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

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 thought
I really don’t know where to begin, this book is only 195 pages, so it is hard to say anything without giving something away. I knew going into this book that people are mainly in 2 camps, they love it, or they hate it. However, I found that I am very much in the middle of the road on this one. Neil writes so beautifully and everything is described so vividly, which at times had me cringing.

This story is told from the point of the narrator remembering events that happened when he was seven years old and how a girl Lettie changed his life. I found the book to be good, but the story for me was not great.

My Rating: /5