[REVIEW] The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

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.

Review:

This book was my first Gaiman book I have read. I wasn't wasn't sure what to expect other than it was a book (and author) that is highly recommended on the Booktube community. 

I wasn't sure what this book was going to be about because the synopsis was superb at being descriptive. I think that was Gaiman's intentions though.  I could never imagine what depth the strange, frightening and dangerous path the narrator would end up taking at such a young age.

Gaiman was great at making his readers think about what his writing could mean. it is simple to imagine the Hempstocks as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone (the triple goddess) of popular mythology because they conform to those roles. 

Ursula Monkton was a character who tried to give people what they wanted. The narrator knew who she was but Monkton kept interfering with his sister and father. It made me wonder if it caused his parents to divorce. 

Overall I did enjoy this novel. I can't wait to read more of Gaiman's work. The next book I will start of his is The Graveyard Book which I hear is excellent. 

I gave this book a 5 star rating on Goodreads.com