The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Hardcover, 336 pages

Published Nov. 5, 2019 by William Morrow & Company, William Morrow.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-299531-5

(1 review)

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.

44 editions

bsag reviewed The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

None

4 stars

This is a magical little tale, told from the perspective of a young man remembering his childhood, when he befriended a strangely ageless young girl living in a farm at the end of his lane. She - and her mother and grandmother (maiden, mother, and crone) - keep slippery and dangerous things from other realms at bay. However, one of these beings slips through (partly due to the boy's actions), and it begins to make his life a misery.

I sped through this book, partly because it is quite short, and partly because the plot and the characters drag you along for the ride. It evokes a lot of feelings from childhood - particularly of powerlessness in the face of the actions of adults - but also that feeling that everything is possible.