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.