This month our book club read The Ocean at the End of the Lane by author Neil Gaiman.  I’m not sure who chose the book but it was definitely different that is for sure!  I’m not sure what category this book falls in to, and have seen some classify it as horror (which I don’t think I agree with), but it is somewhere in the fantasy/magic type genre.  We had a good discussion about the book and 3 thought it was ok and 1 really liked the book.  Either way we all read something new and that is what being in a book club is all about, going outside of your comfort zone!

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 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.

My Review

This was a rather bizarre book. I wasn’t sure what to make of it and the ending left me a bit confused. Were the memories of the adult male reality or fantasy? I suppose that is up to the reader to decide. And did Lettie, her mom and grandmother never really age? And if they didn’t, how did they age at least to that point.

I gave it 3 paws, not bad but not my normal cup of tea.