Coraline

Having recently moved into a new apartment with her loving but terminally distracted and preoccupied parents, Coraline finds herself bored one rainy day and, upon her father's suggestion, decides to explore the flat. She finds a locked door in the drawing room, which her mother opens and explains once led to the flat next door and was bricked up when they separated the building (which was once a single house) into apartments. That night, Coraline hears a strange noise and sees a small black shadow slip down the hall outside her bedroom and into the drawing room; when Coraline turns on the light, it has vanished.

The next day she takes her mother's key and opens the door, to find that it suddenly opens not onto the brick wall, but onto a dark corridor, down which she finds another apartment, seemingly a twisted copy of her own. This alternate world is inhabited by her "Other Mother" and "Other Father", two duplicates of her parents except with buttons sewn over their eyes. Once there, her Other Mother traps Coraline in the other world by kidnapping her parents, wanting her to live there forever. Coraline learns that her Other Mother captured three other children before her and turned them into ghosts, stealing their souls. Desperate to escape, Coraline makes a bet with her Other Mother: If she can find the three children's souls and her parents, then they can all go home. The Other Mother agrees, swearing to honor the agreement on her "good right hand". Coraline uses a stone with a hole in it (given to her previously by an eccentric neighbor) to find the children's souls, despite attempts by the Other Mother to trick her. The children warn Coraline that the Other Mother will break her word sooner than let Coraline leave. Coraline confronts her Other Mother and pretends to guess falsely that her real parents are trapped in the corridor between the two flats. When the Other Mother opens the door to prove that she's wrong, Coraline escapes with the souls, the key to the door, and her parents (who were actually hidden as ornaments in a snow globe above the mantlepiece). The children are able to pass on to the afterlife, but Coraline's task is not yet done. After breaking her word, the Other Mother sends her good right hand to retrieve the black key. The hand enters Coraline's world and tries to steal the key to the door from her. Coraline manages to lure the hand to a well and tricks it into falling into the well, ridding the world of the danger of the Other Mother forever.

This novel deals with concerns about identity, family love and belief in one's self.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline