181 pages
English language
Published Feb. 28, 2013
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.
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.
I hate typing reviews on my phone. Will review later.
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
