The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
Published by HarperCollins
Publication Date June 18, 2013
Goodreads

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.

First Sentence

It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm. It wasn’t very big.

Lettie Hempstock said it was an ocean, but I knew that was silly. She said they’d come here across the ocean from the old country.

What I Liked

• Neil Gaiman narrated The Ocean at the End of the Lane and for me, it made the story.  He brought the novel to life with his inflection and pacing.  Neil Gaiman is someone I could listen to read the phonebook.
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane was incredibly descriptive and transported the reader into the backdrop at hand.

 

What I didn’t like

• This is not necessarily a criticism of the book, but it was not what I was expecting.  I opened The Ocean at the End of the Lane thinking it would be more along the lines of Fred Savage being read a story by Columbo.  Instead I got a story more akin to The Wizard of Oz.  There is nothing wrong with The Wizard of Oz, it just wasn’t what I was expecting.
• Because of the above, I did have a hard time getting into the story. However, I did enjoy the child-like perspective given throughout.

 

Overall

I was intrigued by The Ocean at the End of the Lane; Neil Gaiman has the ability to create a world all his own and sucks the reader in with a twist of a word. Despite the fact that I was not as enthralled as I would have hoped, I would definitely try reading something by Neil Gaiman again.

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