Paperback, 192 pages
Published June 18, 2013 by William Morrow.
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 …
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.
This is probably 4.5 stars. It was strange but I liked it. Like poetry, maybe. It felt like memory and sadness, like visiting the past, which is always sad because it’s gone.
I honestly want to use this book as a teaching tool for how to describe the amazing, salivating power of describing delicious food from a perspective of narrative memory. Every time a part of the story delved into the tastes, smells, and textures of food, I felt like I needed to look up a recipe on whatever was being talked about.
I liked the story. The creature from another place. The violent possession and manipulation of his father. The memory of what was witnessed in the car. The narrative telling of a dark childhood, and the reaching for memories that seemed lost and blurry - brought back to the foreground by coming back around the childhood home.
A good, short read of dark fantasy.
My second Gaiman book. A story I liked, filled with fantasy, mystery and nostalgia; made me think about my childhood years; in a similar way such as the protagonist reflected on half remembered adventures and things that were true back then but aren’t anymore. With wonders and fears, amazement and disappointments. I think most of us can relate to some of that.
I enjoyed the narration by Gaiman, personally getting a longing feeling from it that just adds to the mystery of the story.
We don’t deserve Neil Gaiman, but we’ve got him and his writing and that is wonderful.
I finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane and I’m a little confused to say that… I didn’t think it was as mind blowing as people told me it was?
I got this book under the recommendation of my sister, who absolutely loved it. I didn’t read the back cover, I didn’t look it up on the internet, she didn’t tell me exactly (or at all) what it was about. It was just one of those blind reads that I like doing. All I knew is that it was written by Gaiman, and that is good enough for me.
Or so I thought.
I had a great time. Some passages really captured me. The mystery about the boy’s name is super cool (and actually it’s not a mystery, it’s just a fact), but… I don’t know. I think it takes more than a Nameless Protagonist to make a …
I finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane and I’m a little confused to say that… I didn’t think it was as mind blowing as people told me it was?
I got this book under the recommendation of my sister, who absolutely loved it. I didn’t read the back cover, I didn’t look it up on the internet, she didn’t tell me exactly (or at all) what it was about. It was just one of those blind reads that I like doing. All I knew is that it was written by Gaiman, and that is good enough for me.
Or so I thought.
I had a great time. Some passages really captured me. The mystery about the boy’s name is super cool (and actually it’s not a mystery, it’s just a fact), but… I don’t know. I think it takes more than a Nameless Protagonist to make a book mind blowing.
I really appreciate all the female characters Mr. Gaiman gave to us in this book. They’re unique in their own way. The Maiden/Mother/Crone triad represented by the Hempstock women was an excellent touch, and even though I wanted to kill the Younger Sister, I also liked her as a functioning character in the story.
The details about certain aspects, such as the cats in the story, the faeric atmosphere surrounding this novella, the easy-reading of the narrative (a characteristic of Mr. Gaiman’s works) was all very pleasing, but the core of the story, or at least how this core was delivered, really bugged me.
I swear to god, I wanted to love this book. That didn’t pan out.
In the end and in its essence, this book felt like a lot of catchphrases jumbled together into one narrative to give that feeling that adults love: the romantization of childhood, since we adults love a good nostalgia. It was like reading “Oh, look at how a child’s innocence and imagination is so much better than being an Adult, here, let me show you The Childhood Secrets™ by writing A Lot Of Sentences That Are Supposed to Be Impactful And Quotable On Social Media”.
Continue with spoilers >>
For the first third of the book, I kept waiting for the POV to come back to Adult Protagonist, until I gave up and realized that yes, I was stuck with this seven year old boy.
Fine, I thought, I can take it.
So until half of the book I was still trying to accept that that boy was my protagonist. When I finally settled for him, the reading was more fluid for me.
The episode in the bathtub was really unsettling and impactful, which was the entire point of it, and it made me dislike the father for the rest of the story, because according to “the thing that called itself Ursula Monkton”, she didn’t make anyone do anything. So there’s that, but I’m not sure how trustful she could be here.
And the cats. I really appreciate the fondness in which Gaiman describes the multiple cats featured in this book, and the relationship between them and their humans. In a time where the world of entertainment loves to portray cats as evil, mean, animals and associate them with unhappy, lonely, worthy-of-pity people (I shiver as I remember Grey’s Anatomy, my last exposure to this type of portrayal), having Mr. Gaiman’s take on the wonderful relationship the Boy had with his cats, and even the peaceful way he described the fog-colored cat of the Hempstocks, was really, really nice.
Like I said earlier, I really liked the Hempstocks, obviously. They’re the entire story for me, I felt compelled into searching the web about where Gaiman got the inspiration to write them, I thought it was a clever move to never give the boy a name, and I felt very enraptured in the action scenes, which isn’t usually the case for me, but overall… I didn’t love the book to understand why it got so many nominations and prizes. My life didn’t change because of it, my views are still the same.
Oh, and one last thing: the protagonist forgetting everything. Man, that’s some cheap trick right there. It’s an unfair and cheap narrative trick that always pissed me off (most notably in Doctor Who, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN), and I stand by what I think here. The only thing worse than that is the “and then he woke up”.
Anyway.
This book was a nice ride, full of ups and downs.
I’m giving this 3 stars because I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, but overall, it was good.
"How old are you?"
--
"Eleven."
--
"How long have you been eleven?"
I love the fairytale-retelling-yet-have-never-been-told-before aspect of Neil Gaiman's writing; his voice and his voice are enchanting. This work is distilled magic that I'd been saving for the a rainy day - no- the rainiest of days. I finally cracked the cover and tried savor each morsel. I drew out it sustenance for as long as I could. And now that I'm finished, it was both worth the exquisite wait and at the same time I know I should have read it much sooner since now I have one more formed world tucked away inside my head.
I loved this more than anything else I've read recently. Gaiman just has a way of drawing you into the world right away and keeping you there until he's done with you. Hearing him read this was also amazing and made the hold even stronger. I was more than a bit sad when it was over, actually. This made me want to read the rest of his work that I haven't gotten to yet, and revisit the stuff that I have already read.
As is often the case with Gaiman, this book is a mixture of fantasy and horror, though the reader is invited to decide what the proportions are. The short review is that if you like Gaiman, you'll probably like this, and if you don't, then this won't change your mind.
The story tells of an unnamed seven-year-old boy and the events that happen to him, revealing things about the true nature of reality in the process. Yes, it has Wise Old Figures and Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and Your Reality Is Part Of A Deeper Reality, and a bunch of other tropes you may have seen before, but that's like saying that a movie has action scenes and car chases: it's still worth seeing, when it's done well, and Gaiman does it well.
I say things that happen to the protagonist because, as was pointed out to …
As is often the case with Gaiman, this book is a mixture of fantasy and horror, though the reader is invited to decide what the proportions are. The short review is that if you like Gaiman, you'll probably like this, and if you don't, then this won't change your mind.
The story tells of an unnamed seven-year-old boy and the events that happen to him, revealing things about the true nature of reality in the process. Yes, it has Wise Old Figures and Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and Your Reality Is Part Of A Deeper Reality, and a bunch of other tropes you may have seen before, but that's like saying that a movie has action scenes and car chases: it's still worth seeing, when it's done well, and Gaiman does it well.
I say things that happen to the protagonist because, as was pointed out to me, "the main character has no agency". This is true: he doesn't do things; things are done to him. I see this as making the situations scarier, since he's only seven and doesn't have a lot of control over his life under the best of circumstances. You can also see this as a story written from the point of view of the MacGuffin, or of the damsel in distress.
Spooky, atmospheric, and fascinating. Pretty much what I expected.
I love Neil Gaiman's modern-day fairy tales. The Ocean at the End of the Lane tells the story of a middle-aged man who comes back to his old neighborhood and remembers a pretty unbelievable part of his childhood.
Gaiman's story is a pretty good story about the troubles of growing up and losing the things that were precious to us as kids.
This was a great read, I had trouble putting it down from the second I picked it up.
A marvelous blend of fantasy and recollection. The tone is intimate and heartfelt, and thoroughly delighted.
I started reading this for an hour or so before bedtime. Now I've finished it and it's way after bedtime.
I really loved the book. Really truly.
The narrator visits the house at the end of the lane on which he grew up. The same family still lives there. He recalls some particular events of his childhood involving the family at the end if the lane.
The story has the vague sort of quality that is shared by both half-forgotten childhood memories and half-remembered dreams. The narrator as a child may not fully understand what he sees but, unlike an adult, he doesn't question it.
I enjoyed this book and would rate it closer to a 3.5 because it was very interesting and almost nostalgic and I wouldn't mind reading it again.
I'm not sure this affected me as emotionally as some but still enjoyed this dark fairytale. Full review to follow.
