I absolutely adore pre teen narrators. I love seeing their worlds from their POV. No melodrama, no hesitation, no wistful thinking about the hot guy/girl, no inner monologue and most importantly no gray shades. I am not saying that those are bad aspects of a story and that I don’t enjoy them (except perhaps the continuous yakking about how handsome the new guy is). Still, books from the preteen perspective always prove to be a refreshing experience. A Relaxing yet fun experience, just like this book was.

Flavia De Luce will always remain my favorite preteen, but Coraline definitely gets the second spot. She is different, loves exploring, wants to wear rainbow colored gloves to school and hates it when people get her name wrong (they call her Caroline, how boring!). Her parents are always glued to the computer, making poor Coraline feel lonely and bored. She also has very interesting neighbors, like the actresses below with their dozens of dogs, or he mad man upstairs trying to train rats to dance and sing.

On one fateful rainy day, poor Coraline is confined to her house by her mother. So our little explorer decides to explore the house and comes across this peculiar door opening to ….nothing but a brick wall. Unfortunately, (fortunate for us) there is more to it than that. The tiny door in her house sometimes leads her to a place exactly like her original house, only it’s perfect. It also has her parents, and they are perfect too, with her mother making delicious food and her father spending quality time with her. Something is amiss though, they have buttons sewed instead of eyes and calls themselves Coraline’s “other mother “and “other father”. Soon, Coraline realizes that she has chosen an adventure which is darker and more sinister than she earlier imagined.

Along with being an awesome adventure, the book focuses on Coraline’s personality development through the novel. She doesn’t gets all mature and serious (God gracious no! how dreadful would that be!) but finds courage and wisdom within her which she didn’t know existed. She uses her wit to save herself and her parents, takes steps which are very hard for her and gives us some memorable quotes like these:

“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?”

And

“Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave” i>

Also, some other interesting characters come along. Like, the cat (cat’s don’t have a name you see); now if only cats were so witty in real life, and could talk :(. There are also her neighbors, and the ancient souls. On a whole, this book felt like a modern version of Alice in the Wonderland. It was jolly fun.

An extra charm was added to this already amazing book by Neil Gaiman’s voice *deep sigh*. I swear I can listen to the man all day long, even if all he said was yada yada. He doesn’t, hopefully, and is the best narrator anyone can ever hope for.

so sparking 4.5 stars from me, and an extra unwanted advice of listening to the audio book version. :D