73. The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

Audio read by the author!

5 unabridged discs

2013 William Morrow Books

181 pgs.

Adult Fantasy

Finished 12/6/2014

Goodreads rating: 3.99

My rating:    3.5 Liked it quite a bit, eventually

TPPL

Contemporary Sussex, England (I guess....)

1st sentence/s:  "It was only a duck pond out at the back of the farm.  It wasn't very big.  Lettie Hempstock said it was an ocean, but I knew that was silly.  She said they'd come here, across the ocean from the old country.  Her mother said that Lettie didn't remember properly and it was a long time ago and anyway the old country had sunk."

My comments:    At first I thought this book just wasn't going to be my cuppa tea.  But, as intricate and odd as the story was, it pulled me in.  I've never finished a Neil Gaiman book before - other than a picture book - although I love his writing  and the way he puts words together.  I'm glad I completed this book - it's the kind of story that will stay with me for awhile.  I'm particularly glad that I listened to the version that Neil Gaiman read himself.  The story is about what happened to a seven-year-old-boy, but told 30-plus years later as an adult.  A big element of creepy -- and a huge imagination needed, which I was able to access after the first disc or so....

Goodreads book summary:  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.