The Ocean at the End of the Lane

This is a different genre than I usually read, but it did stir my mind and was a good read. It will be a good while before I forget Lettie and her young friend.

Great quality book. It came with no wear to the cover or pages. For a readers who are very particular about the quality and condition of their books, this illustrated edition is a must, especially for Gaiman fans.

Not to put too fine a point on it...this book was Illuminating... to remember a childhood...series of events so vividly with a truly magical spin was a pleasure and a horror to read. I have only read AA couple of Neil Gaiman's books for kids and adults before this and did not have a clear idea what to expect! Did not expect this!This book was a fantasy , filled with elements of real childhood lived experience.It was all the attributes I listed in the title of my review and so much more in one novel.An adult/child narration makes for a deeper tale told with two perspectives. Ioved it after I was finished reading the book!I wrestled while reading the book with incredulous feelings! I was not sure I could "go along" with the fantastical and miraculous and disturbing and unbelievable events and evil seeming beings in the narrative... I was skeptical and a bit worried about this boy/man's recollections of childhood events that haunted him into adulthood and then realized that this tale reflects so many recollections we have of our own childhoods that get distorted in our memories over time and may need real memory and real reflection over time...A fictional story everyone should read! A reminder of how fragile adult memories can be .I loved this book because, as fantastical and harrowing as it was, it was a reflection of things that are so real to all of us as children when traumatic events or events that we perceive are traumatic to kids can haunt or effect us as adults and cause us tremendous joy or pain upon reflection and can be analyzed in adulthood in a way that can hinder or help our mental.health!Such a book! One that makes one think, reflect, savor or despise ones own experiences as a child.An amazing book.I would recommend this book for adults who love fantasy and puzzles and Oceans in buckets.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is my first adult Neil Gaiman reading experience. After reading a brief synopsis, I was wholeheartedly skeptical as to whether I would enjoy the novel or not. What I expected was a boring, painfully paced story that would never strike my interest, however, what I received instead was an engrossing tale of magical realism, old world fantasy, and grief.This is a novel about a middle-aged man who returns to his childhood home upon the death of a relative. During the wake, he takes a break from the crowds to visit a farm at the end of the lane. He comes across a lovely pond on the property, which helps him remember a young girl he knew as a child named Lettie, who had always believed that the small body of water was actually an ocean. Our protagonist sits down by this ocean and begins to reminisce about Lettie and the very special friendship that they had formed.From the moment that I opened up the first page, I could feel my imagination being swept up in full-bodied depictions of scenery amidst a mournful reminiscence that would reveal a child’s amazing yet bittersweet journey into a realm of magic and friendship.Gaiman’s prose is absolutely breathtaking. The simplicity with which he creates the atmosphere provides an air that feels almost perfect for a child’s tale. Yet as our middle-aged protagonist finds himself sitting beside a very familiar pond on his neighbor’s property, the story transitions into an exploration of loss and loneliness that’s decidedly quite mature in nature. It’s stunningly elegiac and hauntingly surreal.The narrative itself is inventive and absorbing, creating a connection between the reader and this child that makes you feel apprehensive for his well-being. I became so invested in what was to come that there were moments where I held my breath without even realizing it. The fantastical facets were morsels of hope, a light in the seemingly dark turn of events, which deepened that connection furthermore.Magical realism is one of my favourite genres to read. While the more obvious components of the genre didn’t make themselves known until the last thirty pages or so, it was woven with such subtlety that it’s positively sublime.I feel I must say that were was a scene of child abuse, from the child’s perspective, that was horrifying. It ended up being a trigger for me as I’m a victim of child abuse, which caused me to take a small break to recover from the effect it had on me. While it is a terribly difficult scene to read, it was written in such a way that you can feel everything that is going on as if it’s happening to you in the moment. That sort of environmental build is a rare experience for me in books, and it was something I appreciated very much, personal reaction aside.Overall, if you don’t mind a book that is a little paced, I would highly recommend The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. It’s an ingenious feat of writing with a tale that expresses quite a lot about the power of faith, magic, and friendship, as well as how differently children and adults can perceive a similar situation. My rating for this is four kittens out of five. I knocked it down one star purely for the personal affect it had on me. Objectively, it’s a five out of five hands down.

I wasn’t very fond of Neil Gaiman when I first picked one of his books up. It was either American Gods or Neverwhere, but his writing was too harsh for me at the time, and I didn’t try him again until Stardust, which I adored and glowingly reviewed. Ocean falls into the vein of Coraline (from what I hear). It is haunting and eerie with words that linger like wine on your tongue.Ocean follows the forays of an unnamed male protagonist when he meanders away from a funeral (we’re never told whose) back to the locale of his youth and into the past. We’re treated to an extensive flashback where the MC recounts the most peculiar incident of his childhood when he was seven years old. At the end of the lane from his house was a pond, but it was always known as an ocean to Lettie Hempstock, the daughter of Mrs. Hempstock, and the granddaughter of Old Mrs. Hempstock. Gaiman explicitly states that the three women are the triple goddess presented in a unique way, and knowing this now, I believe the antagonist represents the fourth face.The seven year old MC suspects Lettie immediately of being something other even when she insists that she’s only eleven years old. He asks “How long have you been eleven?” and Lettie can only smile. Our young protagonist lives with his parents and sister in a large country house, and when finances begin to dwindle his parents decide to rent out rooms to help make up for the lack. When one of their tenants commits suicide near the edge of the property and the Hempstock’s farm, that’s when the strangeness begins. The Hempstocks dwell in a sort of in between. Their farmhouse is in this world, but also beside it. So when the man dies, it arouses the attention of something “nearby” that sees human weakness and frailty and decides it wants to make people happy, because on a cosmic scale that’s quite easy. The thing begins giving people money, which our protagonist discovers when he awakens to a coin in his throat. Having the sense that Lettie would be the best person to explain this, he tells her, and her mother and grandmother decide to let the youngest Hempstock handle the issue and take our young hero along.This turns out to not be the best idea when they meet something that can barely be described, a strange flapping fabric abomination that manages to get inside our hero through a hole it drilled in his foot. Now in our world the thing that calls itself “Ursula Monkton” masquerades as our MC’s nanny.Gaiman is the master at weaving disturbing tales, because just when you think it can’t get any darker or creepier it does. There are creatures called “hunger birds,” the carrion eaters per se of the universe. Everyone fears the darkness, but what does the darkness fear? The answer in Ocean is the hunger birds, but the layers go even deeper than that. Even the greater darkness fears something…there is always a dark behind the dark. There’s a definite Lovecraftian vibe to this story with the air of the cosmic horror.Ocean gave me everything I could ask for in a story and more. The eerie tides that flow beneath the foundation of the world that most of us will never see and for that we should be glad. Gaiman in less than 200 pages revealed what our own world could be, what horrors could be unleashed through the eyes of a child (which is what we all become in the dark), and he left us with a bittersweet song.