Book: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: Fantasy, Fiction
Synopsis: 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.
What I liked about it...
Neil Gaiman is a story-teller. The chapters are beautifully written. There are very strong and vivid images from this book that will stay forever in my heart. There are even sad and scary ones like this one when the protagonist told his father, “Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?” that will haunt me forever.
Besides that, I can’t even seem to structure a concrete review about how good it is and I don’t quite know where to start. So I would just quote passages that I loved.
"Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world."
"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."
"Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody."
"Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive."
What didn’t work for me...
There’s really nothing I don’t like about this book but what I kept on thinking is that the book is full of magic, obviously, and towards the end, I don’t quite understand what’s true and what’s not. Especially when the protagonist asked old Mrs. Hempstock, “Is it true?” and she answered, “Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.” That only, and maybe the lack of story about the Hempstocks, like, who are they really?
My Verdict
I loved this book, genuinely. I actually finished it in one sitting. I look forward to reading it again when adult life exhausts me and I will definitely recommend it to my book nerd friends.
MY RATING:
★★★★☆
No comments:
Post a Comment