The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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P.M. Bradshaw, September 3, 2013 (view all comments by P.M. Bradshaw)
A children's book that's not for children? It's difficult to describe. An adult fairy tale?

It's beautifully written, and captures the feel of childhood instantly.
A short book, but BIG on story.
It's fun & furious, uplifting & downtrodden, scary & scarier, and impossible to put down!

It's a great starting point if you haven't read Neil Gaiman before.

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Darahlee10, August 10, 2013 (view all comments by Darahlee10)
An unnamed well developed main character narrates his life shaping childhood memories. Economy force reduced living conditions on his small family. A live-in sitter is hired for him and his sister. Only he feels trapped and aware as the new sitter Ursula becomes their sinister adversary, causing bondage unknown to their parents. Situations become unbearable for him and he stumbles upon his new friend Lettie. “Children as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths while adults take roads and official paths.” Suspense builds at each new turn of events. Common spells are replaced with recipes sometimes, his friend Lettie explains. Ursula begged Lettie to send her back while not looking even faintly human. Turning on Lettie and the main character Ursula becomes evil in her deadly attack, using ancient deceptions. Lettie and the main character confront Ursula. This descriptive fable plays out courageous times in the lives of two determined children and their resourcefulness. Many demonic gripping dangers could win in this thrilling children’s story.

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Elliott, June 20, 2013 (view all comments by Elliott)
Once again, Gaiman delivers. A brilliantly and imaginatively rendered modern fairy tale that never fails to surprise and move the reader. In this slender novel, he plays with the uncertainties of memory, what's real and what's imagined. It is a tightly focused narrative that creates a whole new mythology that reads as if it has always existed. It is easily one of Neil Gaiman's best books.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780062255655

Author:

Gaiman, Neil

Publisher:

William Morrow & Company

Subject:

Fantasy - General

Subject:

Literature-A to Z

Subject:

Literary

Subject:

General Fiction

Subject:

Science Fiction and Fantasy-Fantasy

Copyright:

2013

Edition Description:

Hardcover

Publication Date:

20130631

Binding:

HARDCOVER

Language:

English

Pages:

192

Dimensions:

8.25 x 5.5 x 0.73 in 10.4 oz

0 stars - 0 reviews

$25.99 In Stock

"Review" by Kirkus Reviews (starred review), “Poignant and heartbreaking, eloquent and frightening, impeccably rendered, its a fable that reminds us how our lives are shaped by childhood experiences, what we gain from them and the price we pay.”

"Review" by Booklist (starred review), “Gaiman mines mythological typology — the three-fold goddess, the water of life (the pond, actually an ocean) — and his own childhood milieu to build the cosmology and theater of a story he tells more gracefully than any he's told since Stardust...[a] lovely yarn.”

"Review" by The Times (London), "His prose is simple but poetic, his world strange but utterly believable — if he was South American we would call this magic realism rather than fantasy."

"Review" by USA Today, "[W]orthy of a sleepless night...a fairy tale for adults that explores both innocence lost and the enthusiasm for seeing what's past one's proverbial fence....Gaiman is a master of creating worlds just a step to the left of our own."

"Review" by Star Tribune (Minneapolis), "Remarkable...wrenchingly, gorgeously elegiac....[I]n The Ocean at the End of the Lane, [Gaiman] summons up childhood magic and adventure while acknowledging their irrevocable loss, and he stitches the elegiac contradictions together so tightly that you won't see the seams."

"Review" by New York Daily News, "[A] compelling tale for all ages...entirely absorbing and wholly moving."

"Review" by The Atlantic Wire, "[A] story concerning the bewildering gulf between the innocent and the authoritative, the powerless and the powerful, the child and the adult....Ocean is a novel to approach without caution; the author is clearly operating at the height of his career."

"Review" by io9, "Ocean has that nearly invisible prose that keeps the focus firmly on the storytelling, and not on the writing....[T]his simple exterior hides something much more interesting; in the same way that what looks like a pond can really be an ocean."

"Review" by New York Post, "This slim novel, gorgeously written, keeps its talons in you long after you've finished."

"Review" by Bookish (Houston Chronicle book blog), "The Ocean at the End of the Lane is fun to read, filled with his trademarked blend of sinister whimsy. Gaiman's writing is like dangerous candy — you're certain there's ground glass somewhere, but it just tastes so good!"

"Review" by Laura Miller, Salon, "The impotence of childhood is often the first thing sentimental adults forget about it; Gaiman is able to resurrect, with brutal immediacy, the abject misery of being unable to control one's own life."

"Review" by Chicago Tribune, "[W]ry and freaky and finally sad....This is how Gaiman works his charms....He crafts his stories with one eye on the old world, on Irish folktales and Robin Hood and Camelot, and the other on particle physics and dark matter."

"Review" by Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), "Gaiman has crafted an achingly beautiful memoir of an imagination and a spellbinding story that sets three women at the center of everything....[I]t's a meditation on memory and mortality, a creative reflection on how the defining moments of childhood can inhabit the worlds we imagine."

"Synopsis" by jenniferc@powells.com, A major new work from "a writer to make readers rejoice" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) — a moving story of memory, magic, and survival.

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 Lane is 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.