The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Publisher: William Morrow
Year Published: 2013
Genre: Fantasy
Started: Sept. 1, 2020
Finished: Sept. 22, 2020
Rating: 5 Stars/ A

This has been on my list to read for many moons. I was excited to see the audiobook was readily available with Libby. My Mornings and chores for the over the couple weeks were a bit more interesting. Neil Gaiman doesn't leave you disappointed at all. Keeps you guessing all the way to the end, on who are all the key players. Who, what and why? When you finally get to the end of the story. You're left sitting there with your mouth hanging open. Going ... REALLY?!?

This is literally my favorite feeling. Gaiman always leaves me just sitting there at the end of a book, needing more. He is one of the few that can actually have me looking one way the entire time and pull a rabbit out of his coat pocket and leave there going what just happened? I can never truly guess what ride I will be going on.

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.