Age: Adult
Genre: Fiction, Magical Realism/Fantasy
Have you
forgotten incidents from your childhood? Of course. But what if you had
traveled with a magical girl to a world beyond the one we know and accidently
brought back a harmful spirit who tried to ruin your family? Surely this would
stick in your memory. But when the narrator of The Ocean at the End of the Lane travels to the site of his
childhood home as an adult, he has to grasp at memories of the little girl
named Lettie Hemstock and the evil they faced together when he was only a boy
of seven. During his visit home, he travels down the lane to the Hemstock farm
and begins to chat with a woman he vaguely remembers. The longer he talks, the
more memories come back to him of the thing that nested in his foot from the
world beyond and took the form of a housekeeper and nanny calling herself
Ursula Monkton. As the story unfolds from the perspective of the man as a young
boy, the reader is taken through a strange world and asked to believe many
things that lead to questions about the nature of reality, magic, and memory.
First of
all, I recommend listening to this as an audio book because it is read by the
author. Gaiman reads it like a true storyteller, giving it a flavor only the
creator of this world can provide. When I began this book, I was unsure why it
was classified as an adult book when the narrator is a seven-year-old boy. Most books narrated by children are written
for children. However, I believe the adult classification is mostly due to some
adult themes in the book. If not for the sexual references (light as they are),
it would likely be enjoyed by children. Perhaps not seven-year-olds, but it
would fit into middle grade easily. The tone of the story is hard to describe.
You could call it magical, but that would sound too happy. You could call it
sinister or dark, but that would sound too harsh. It is somewhere in between. The
characters are all well-formed, and the author makes sure we know who the villain
is and hate her just as much as the main character does. His descriptions are
so clear that you feel as if you are in the fields running from the carpet
monster with the narrator. This book fits well into Gaiman’s other writings and
will leave you with feelings of suspicion, wonder, and perhaps fear of the
unknown.
Bibliographic
Information:
Gaiman, Neil. The
Ocean at the End of the Lane. New York: Harper Collins, 2013.
