The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
Okay so you probably know by now that Neil Gaiman can DO NO WRONG in my opinion.
I have given every single book of his I have devoured this year RAVING reviews.
He’s magically and mystically amazing.
He just is.
So here is a summary of my latest read of his:
“This bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival, and memory and magic, makes the impossible all too real…
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 where she once lived, 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.
A groundbreaking work as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark, 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.”
I was entranced by this book even though it was on the “scarier” side.
I put that in quotations because MY version of the word scary and the majority of the world’s version of the word scary are VASTLY different.
I do NOT like to be scared.
Horror can stay far far away from me.
Here is the thing about Neil Gaiman though…
I feel like he can write about scary type of things but still have so many OTHER things in there that are NOT scary that those beautiful heart grabbing emotional things almost over ride the creepy check under your bed at night kind of things….
plus he always has humor of the dry British kind too which is HANDS DOWN my fave.
The thing that kept getting at me this entire book was that the main character was 7 years old when the majority of this story takes place…which is the current age of my youngest….
and I kept envisioning HIM going thru all the fantastical situations with other worldly creatures…
And I kept thinking “Dang. My kid would NEVER be able to handle that as well!!” 🤣
This book was fabulous…as is all of Neil Gaiman’s work I am convinced… even though I have only dug into some of it thus far.
Job well done AGAIN Mr Gaiman.