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.
I like Gaiman in general but I especially liked this book. Its a story, a reality fantasy, and an allegory. I read it in one day, canceling an important thing to finish. Its an especially good traveling companion.
Lots of wonderful imagery, and he captures nostalgia quite well. There are some very uncomfortable scenes in the middle, which was surprising. I thought this book would be another child's tale like Coraline, but it really is a tale about middle age and memory. I thought it spent too much time in the nethers. The best parts I thought, were in the present, not the past. Even preferred the epilogue to the middle part of the book. Harsh?
I can't read Neil Gaiman's books. But I can listen to him read his books all day long. It's like having Paddington Bear read you a bedtime story while you're tucked safely in your childhood bed on a cold winter's night. I didn't like this book as much as The Graveyard Book, but I still enjoyed it. I felt the ending was very appropriate and would have been upset if everything had been tied-up neatly with a nice little bow.
Me ha gustado en general, pero hay pequeños detalles que no me han acabado de convencer (si no, le pondría cinco estrellas). El tono de realismo mágico que impregna toda la historia es con lo que me quedaría, sin duda.
Si no fuera por cierta escena, hubiera colocado este libro en una colección de literatura infantil y juvenil... tiene más parecidos a Coraline y a El libro del cementerio que a otras novelas de Gaiman. Y a la vez, porque tiene un tono de nostalgia permanente sobre la infancia y sobre sus recuerdos, no lo pondría.
(Es difícil de clasificar, la verdad.)
The Ocean At The End of the Lane is a gem of a book, mostly because it seems to be such a clear window into the experience of being a child. Gaiman's novel is very adult, and yet, it's told very convincingly in the voice of a seven year old boy. This tale has a distinctive, magical atmosphere.
One of my favorite quotes:
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
The storyline flows so nicely that it's hard to put down after beginning. And it's not …
The Ocean At The End of the Lane is a gem of a book, mostly because it seems to be such a clear window into the experience of being a child. Gaiman's novel is very adult, and yet, it's told very convincingly in the voice of a seven year old boy. This tale has a distinctive, magical atmosphere.
One of my favorite quotes:
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
The storyline flows so nicely that it's hard to put down after beginning. And it's not long, so--go ahead, sit down and enjoy this one!
So, my very first taste of Neil Gaiman's writing. I found it weird, a bit strange and very odd. Gaiman pulls you in with his descriptive language and I was really curious where this book was going to end up. For me, it felt like reading a Salvador Dali painting. Very melty. That said, I may read Gaiman books again, but they're not at the top of my reading list. :)
"I wish you'd explain properly," I said. "You talk in mysteries all the time."
"Ocean at the End of the Lane" was selected the 2013 winner for Fantasy and that only made it more frustrating as it left me expecting more. The book did belong in the fantasy genre, but it was more children's literature than adult fantasy. The story was moved along in riddles and incoherent dialogue from most of the characters and the silver lining in all of this is that it was a quick read so I didn't have to invest too much in to completing it.
Neil Gaiman does it again with a swift and sweet tale that is simply magical.
It's been a long time since I couldn't put a book down until I reached the very last page, and then read the author's thank you notes afterwards too in denial that I'd really reached the end.
This book has a very similar tone and feel as The Graveyard Book. It's like the distilled essence of Neil Gaiman at his very best: simple on top but deeply complex underneath, layers and layers I only started to glimpse on the first read-through. It's a short book, 2 hours' read at the most, but it's the kind of book that you reach the end and immediately want to start right back at the beginning and read again. I'm currently trying to convince myself I need to go to sleep now instead of going right back to page 1.
There were a lot of books this could have been and I think my opinion of it suffered from having heard so much about it and wanting it to have been those other books. I wanted this to be a book about the unreliable memory of childhood and how age gives a mundane tint and banal explanations for the remembered magic, both awesome and awful. I wanted this to be a book about the adult that we become and how that holds up to the children that we were and the continuous source of identity.
Instead, it's a modern fairy tale. I love modern fairy tales and this is a great one, but I can't forgive it for not being the book I wanted it to be.
Neil Gaimen is a masterful story teller and this book doesn't disappoint. He weaves a masterful tale full of fantasy and a child's mindset. Great read.
I did not want this book to be over, and that's always the sign of a great book to me.
Can I just admit that I was so disappointed at the shortness of this novel that I had a hard time enjoying it? I know that's ridiculous, but when your favorite author ever writes an adult novel for the first time in 1/4 of your life and it's less than 200 pages long...well, I was bummed. To say the least. And it took me way longer to read this than was strictly necessary. I think I will need to read it again to fully appreciate it. I rated it 4 stars mostly based on his previous work and talent, and my enjoyment of his work in general.
Lovely, and slightly frightening, just like a Neil Gaiman book should be
I'm not sure where to start with this book...It feels like it has a certain shifting quality, something you can't pin down. Like another person could flip through the same copy I read and encounter a totally different story. I'm really glad I read a physical copy rather than an ebook of it, because otherwise I think my suspicion would be worse and I would have to have someone else read it aloud to me, just to be sure.
Of course, I'm sure this was intentional.
I expected The Ocean at the End of the Lane to be different, before I read it. Different in the sense that I thought it was going to be a nice, governed-by-the-laws-of-nature piece of contemporary fiction, about a lonely and perhaps wayward man reminiscing on his childhood. And it still kind of was--I mean, without the governed-by-the-laws-of-nature piece. Those laws aren't broken, just bent, …
I'm not sure where to start with this book...It feels like it has a certain shifting quality, something you can't pin down. Like another person could flip through the same copy I read and encounter a totally different story. I'm really glad I read a physical copy rather than an ebook of it, because otherwise I think my suspicion would be worse and I would have to have someone else read it aloud to me, just to be sure.
Of course, I'm sure this was intentional.
I expected The Ocean at the End of the Lane to be different, before I read it. Different in the sense that I thought it was going to be a nice, governed-by-the-laws-of-nature piece of contemporary fiction, about a lonely and perhaps wayward man reminiscing on his childhood. And it still kind of was--I mean, without the governed-by-the-laws-of-nature piece. Those laws aren't broken, just bent, by the Hempstock family. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn't what I got.
This book really was different.
It made me uneasy in the best way possible. Like all the other reviews are saying, it's the perfect representation of childhood, infused with an extra dose of the fantastic. And I feel it's best summed up by my oh-so-eloquent verbal review to my family the other day: "Weird book. Really weird. There was a worm in his foot. And it's scary." It's also scary good. Read this book.
