Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: Adult Fantasy
Buy it on Amazon: Hardcover or Kindle
Book Description:
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.
What I Think:
This is not our usual genre and to be honest, I don’t know if I would pick up the book on my own. Enter my husband, who took a chance on a recommendation from a bookstore employee and then recommended it to me. It is a simple fact that Neil Gaiman is a seamless storyteller and very brilliant with words. But, this is definitely a book for an adult as there are one or two scenes that I feel are not appropriate for a younger audience…and it’s not that they’re graphic, but Gaiman can describe the emotions and the actions in such a way that can make you really scared. Overall, I appreciated the lesson of sacrifice, I feel like our culture can sometimes encourage selfishness over sacrifice. And I appreciated the short but simple way the story was written. I was sometimes frustrated that Gaiman didn’t explain all of the terms or the background of the Hempstocks, etc but I also understood his reasoning in keeping it a mystery. If you are a literary buff, then you will enjoy this even more. I hope you have a chance to give this one a try…it also just won the Goodreads Choice award in the category of Fantasy to boot.
![](http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=flippingthepage.com&blog=39289684&post=1984&subd=flippingthepagedotcom&ref=&feed=1)