The Ocean at the End of the Lane

From Goodreads:

 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.

 

 

From Me:

I had been wanting to read Neil Gaiman forever.

But... I just didn't get this book.

I listened to it on audio and it was narrated by  Gaiman.  I think he did a wonderful job reading his own story, and  while there were parts that kept me engrossed, there were many more parts that had me thinking....wha???

Maybe that was the whole point.

I will give Gaiman another try--I do own 'The Graveyard Book'-- he is so well respected and loved in the literary world--- and seriously, I can understand a clown in a sewer named Pennywise? Why not this one? -- I'm sure I can 'get' another of Gaiman's books.

It must have been my mood.

 

I hate when that happens.

3 stars.