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.
Another wonderful Gaiman masterpiece. Beautiful, imaginative, and melancholy….all the notes he so regularly hits with each book.
I read The Graveyard Book a few months back, which was less frightening and a bit more humorous than The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which is also features a child protagonist. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is just all sorts of creepy and scary for me, a big wuss.
Overall this was a quick, engrossing read that I’m glad I wasn’t reading all by myself at night!
Hard to talk about this one without giving away any of the magic, so just go read it!
