The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
I've loved most of Neil Gaiman's books I've read so far (save American Gods) but The Ocean at the End of the Lane is so beautiful and heart-warming, it is now my new favorite of his. My previous favorite of Gaiman's was Neverwhere in case you're like me and not knowing would have bothered you to no end.
Back to The Ocean at the End of the Lane, it is everything you could want in a story about childhood; adventure, magic, overcoming fears, the things that children know and adults begin to forget.
“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."
While reading, I found truth, joy, love and a sad, sweet melancholy that pulled at my heart and made me fall right into the pages. This book touched me so deeply that I know it will stay with me for years to come and I'll find myself rereading it in the near future.
The setting in the English countryside was both beautiful and hauntingly creepy and added to the atmosphere of the book. Our narrator as a middle-aged man dealing with loss who finds his way back to his childhood neighborhood. It is somewhat isolated and a little lonely, and thus makes him reminisce about a specific week when he was seven years old and the adventure, magic and monsters that followed. During this time, our narrator realized that the world isn't as safe as he believed and adults are sometimes wrong and scared themselves.
Our narrator comes to learn so many other things; that everyone is more than they appear and you can't fail at being a person. Even when you feel so different and alone that you never believe you'll find true happiness, you will, you absolutely will.
The ending was a tinge sad, but also perfect for the story. There is nothing I would change for this novel and I know I will be rereading this in the future to feel that magic all over again.
I also listened to an audiobook where Neil Gaiman himself reads the story. I think he added such a charming quality to the story as you could feel the emotion and magic through his retelling.
Synopsis 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.