While reading "The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls," I kept thinking of "Coraline" -- which isn't a bad thing, since "Coraline" is an absolutely brilliant book. 
 And while this creepy little book isn't quite as perfect as Neil Gaiman's novel, it has much the same atmosphere of creeping grotesquerie and evil hidden under friendliness. Claire Legrand's first novel starts off merely uneasy, and slowly ramps up into a horrifying conspiracy that has a whole town under its thrall. 
 Victoria Wright likes everything to be perfect -- her hair, her clothes, her demeanor, her report cards, and her plans for a future job. Only one thing about her life is imperfect: her dreamy, piano-obsessed friend/project Lawrence. 
 One day, Lawrence vanishes on a "trip" to relatives, and Victoria notices that other children have vanished from school -- but children who are "imperfect" in some way. Whenever she asks about them, people act strangely and peculiar insects begin to swarm. Soon she begins to suspect that all this weirdness has something to do with the Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, a local orphanage. 
 But her investigation leads her a little too close for the eerie Mrs. Cavendish's liking -- and soon Victoria finds herself in a living nightmare, inside a supernatural house where children are tortured into becoming "right." To vanquish Mrs. Cavendish and her monstrous gardener, Victoria will need every bit of help she can get. 
 Yes, "The Cavendish Home For Boys and Girls" -- despite its innocuous title -- does remind me a lot of "Coraline." We have a tough, smart heroine, a pleasantly malevolent antagonist, and an ordinary little town with a festering dark presence under the surface. The further you go into the story, the more grotesque and disturbing it gets. 
 The bright spot is Victoria herself. She's kind of cold and insensitive at first, since she seems more upset about getting (gasp!) a B in music class than about alienating Lawrence. But once he vanishes, we see her strength and inquisitiveness -- especially since she realizes that she has too many similarities to Mrs. Cavendish. 
 Legrand starts out the story with just a vague sense of unease, and her British-flavored prose gives an arch flavor to Victoria's quest. But the sense of horror grows more intense as the story unfolds, with a extra-dimensional house, torture closets, insects and... Mrs. Cavendish. This character's spidery fingernails and ravenous smile will give you nightmares. 
 The one problem I had was the gofers. I felt the whole cannibalism/transformation thing was a bit too blunt, and didn't quite fit with the overall tone. 
 "The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls" sounds like a charming little romp at an orphanage. It's not. It's a slowly-building nightmare with a delightfully determined heroine.