Book Review:The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

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.

Neil Gaiman seems to get better and better with each new book. This book was outstanding. I literally couldn’t put it down. It is a page turner all the way through but that ending! I am not gonna post it for fear of spoilers but if you have read it I would love to hear your thoughts.

This book took me back to when I was growing up in the central Appalachian Mountains and had my own hidy places. I loved his descriptions of the environment in the book. It felt as if I was right there with the main character who never has a name in the book. That’s ok because he does not really need a name. It starts out like a normal fiction book then it adds in the supernatural elements. Yes, books like this require you to suspend disbelief but Gaiman writes so skillfully that this is not at all difficult to do. In this world, all the schematics makes sense so that you are never like, how did THAT happen?

Like I said I really enjoyed this book, but I was awed at the ending. I want to discuss the ending but again spoilers. I will say this, it is interesting how events that happened to you can change shape in your mind. You think you remember it correctly then you revisit it as an adult and find that your environment and who you are and the blocking out painful bits can shape the event in your mind. Things are not always as they seem. Or are they? This got me to thinking about events in my own childhood and how I remember them and I wonder if my memories are clouded with the stuff that I have accumulated along the way.  How many of my really bad memories have been distorted by time? It is interesting to think about.