Book Review: The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, by Neil Gaiman

Genre: Magical Realism
Date Published: June 2013
Publisher: William Morrow Books
# Of Pages/Listening Time: 181 pages/5 hours 45 minutes

Goodreads | Audible

Synopsis: Sussex, England. 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.

My Rating:

 ★★★★

.....For being an enchanting read

My Thoughts:

This was a...quiet story, I guess you could say. It felt like a children's story without being a children's story. Everything is from the point of view of a seven-year-old boy, so while it's all supposed to be terrifying, it feels less scary because everything's been filtered through the lens of a child's perspective.

I loved the writing in this book. Neil Gaiman has a talent for writing in a such a way that brings the magic of the story to life. You accept everything he says as a fact of life because how could it be any other way? Of course the duck pond is actually an ocean in disguise! It makes perfect sense!

What I was most impressed with was how successfully Gaiman managed to depict the youthful innocence of a young child. In my opinion, it was the most convincing part of the whole story.

Overall, this story was quick and somehow lovely in a weird, Neil Gaiman sort of way. If you're already a fan of this author, you'll definitely enjoy this story. If you've never read him before (how on Earth having you been reading all this time without trying one of his books?!), this is a good story to try first.