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.
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.
Enjoyable read, but when finished I found myself wondering what it was for.
How does Neil Gaiman do it? He writes about my childhood thoughts in ways I was never able to put into words, as though he had peeked into my life and somehow made it richer.
This is definitely one of Gaiman's most disturbing/dark texts, which for me makes reading it feel like finding a missing puzzle piece I didn't know I was looking for, fitting around his other novels like a glove. It recreates the sensation of a childhood nightmare better than other books I've seen try, and some of its scenes were even hard to stomach. Still, this sits firmly within Gaiman's well known fantasy territory, and by now that darkness is par for the course. The writing, as always, is great and mesmerizing, both when the narrator reflects upon childhood memories that feel all too real and when the focus switches to entities made of shadow and oceans that fit in buckets.
My only complaint about it would be its length; I didn't mind having to read it in short bursts so that it would last me longer, but still, the characters and …
This is definitely one of Gaiman's most disturbing/dark texts, which for me makes reading it feel like finding a missing puzzle piece I didn't know I was looking for, fitting around his other novels like a glove. It recreates the sensation of a childhood nightmare better than other books I've seen try, and some of its scenes were even hard to stomach. Still, this sits firmly within Gaiman's well known fantasy territory, and by now that darkness is par for the course. The writing, as always, is great and mesmerizing, both when the narrator reflects upon childhood memories that feel all too real and when the focus switches to entities made of shadow and oceans that fit in buckets.
My only complaint about it would be its length; I didn't mind having to read it in short bursts so that it would last me longer, but still, the characters and world-building had more potential than the book's 180 pages allowed for. Still, it's good to see Gaiman return to adult fiction; and even though I know quantity doesn't trump quality, I hope his next book is closer to American Gods' page count than this.
I tend not to enjoy even light child abusey themes. I liked the mythology and imagery, and it has potential for a series, but there were many moments I was uncomfortable in between not really caring that much about the protagonist.
Gorgeous.
Loved it
Neil Gaiman combines his autobiography with his own typical style of storytelling we're familiar with. It's a very decent story, however, some of the "meta passages" come off as a bit weird as they come very close to breaching the fourth wall. Neil, you can be subtler than this!
Four? How dare I rate Gaiman fewer than five (or eleven) stars! Have I lost my mind or—gasp—my heart?
First, though: [b:Ocean|15783514|The Ocean at the End of the Lane|Neil Gaiman|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1351914778s/15783514.jpg|21500681] was great. Moving, poetic, sublime. Gaiman's writing just keeps on improving. Sentences that merit savoring. Ambiance that can fill a room. There is no doubt that I'll be reading it again some day, perhaps listening. It's masterful.
It's just the substance that's lacking. Too-perfect and -wise characters; an improbably precocious seven-year-old; third-person narrative awkwardly expressed as first-person (for the intimacy, which I'll admit does work); several convenient Dei ex Machina. I never felt any real tension, perhaps because I never understood the rules. Much like the child protagonist I was just swept along for the ride, trusting that all would be taken care of... only I'm not seven any more. And as for the titular Ocean: I …
Four? How dare I rate Gaiman fewer than five (or eleven) stars! Have I lost my mind or—gasp—my heart?
First, though: [b:Ocean|15783514|The Ocean at the End of the Lane|Neil Gaiman|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1351914778s/15783514.jpg|21500681] was great. Moving, poetic, sublime. Gaiman's writing just keeps on improving. Sentences that merit savoring. Ambiance that can fill a room. There is no doubt that I'll be reading it again some day, perhaps listening. It's masterful.
It's just the substance that's lacking. Too-perfect and -wise characters; an improbably precocious seven-year-old; third-person narrative awkwardly expressed as first-person (for the intimacy, which I'll admit does work); several convenient Dei ex Machina. I never felt any real tension, perhaps because I never understood the rules. Much like the child protagonist I was just swept along for the ride, trusting that all would be taken care of... only I'm not seven any more. And as for the titular Ocean: I feel like Gaiman started with a great title but then just sort of veered off, occasionally remembering to mention it in passing. There's a story there, a rich one, but this isn't it.
I don't feel disappointed. I feel warm, even hours after having finished it. (And that's not just June in New Mexico). I am overwhelmingly grateful to Gaiman for sharing his words and worlds. I just think he can do better.
This book pulled me along as quickly as anything has since The Sisters Brothers. An adult fairy tale with one foot in childhood and another in contemporary horror, I felt true dread for the seven-year-old protagonist several times; he doesn't quite understand how horrible a mess he's gotten himself in sometimes, but with the perspective of age, we do.
The Hempstocks, his neighbors down the lane, are a delight. They're just who you think they might be when they first appear, but also more. (I think Old Mrs. Hempstock may have been partly inspired by Galactus.)
I enjoy the way Gaiman's supernatural world doesn't lean too hard on the mythology of olden times, but rhymes with it. That way we get to experience the world of this book fresh, just as the protagonist does.
