The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman

Title: The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

Author: Neil Gaiman

Type: Novel
Genre: Fantasy

Series: No

Pages: 181

Copyright:  2013

Publisher: William Morrow

Rating: 3 out of 5


Summary: from Good Reads

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.

Feelings:
I enjoyed this book. I did at times feel like it was a little slow but because of the length of the story I think that was a good thing. There was a lot that happened in the story and not all of it was clear from the beginning. The narrator is remembering a childhood full of dark things. As the book progresses we learn more and more of what happened in his past.

I liked the progression of the story. The ending of the story felt very right. There are some stories that I would argue that the ending could have been better or maybe different as it didn't seem to fit right. This story the ending worked. It completed and yet wasn't so final as to make it so the reader can't imagine a future.

I would recommend this book to those that like a fantasy set in this world. However, let me note that the book has gotten a lot of hype and I'm not really sure that it lives up to that. I have enjoyed Neil Gaiman's other books more.