THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE by Neil Gaiman

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

Hardcover, 181 pages

Published June 18th 2013 by William Morrow Books 

Neil Gaiman's stories always surprise me. I have no idea where they are taking me and by the end I'm breathless with wonder. His writing and storytelling are amazing. But the stories are, well, weird. Unusual. Different. Strange. Unrelatable.

That's the word. Unrelatable. I don't relate to the characters in his books. That's not a bad thing. Storytelling doesn't necessarily mean we have to understand the main people in the story. I do not relate to a princess who talks to animals but I still like the romance. I totally don't understand being raised in a cemetery by ghosts, who are my family and friends, but the idea is intriguing. 

I wasn't expecting certain aspects of this story and they didn't really appeal to me. But it was interesting. I listened to the whole book, wanting to know how this mystery would end. 

There really wasn't much I remember about the book though. If you asked me what it was about, I would say, "a couple of witches fighting something evil while a young boy watched." Seriously. I don't remember the name of the evil or the witches or the boy.

Rating: PG 13

V: Fighting

L: Not that I remember

S: No

Liked:

The storytelling
The writing

Disliked:

Premise

3 STARS

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