The Ocean at the End of the Lane

This was another one of those choices on my Kindle when I couldn't come up with anything else. Having never read anything by Neal Gaiman, I checked out The Ocean at the End of the Lane with no idea what to expect.

Source

Good Reads' 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.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Laneis 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.?"

What I Thought: This was kind of a weird story. I'm still not really sure what I think about it. Having said that, the writing was captivating. The characters were deep. It was just a bit out there for my imagination right now, I guess. Maybe fantasy isn't my thing.

Rating: * * 1/2