From the Bookshelf of The Reading For Pleasure Book Club…

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Neil Gaiman

Start date: August 1, 2014

Finish date: March 31, 2015

Discussion: Book Club Monthly Group Reads

Why we're reading this: This is our winner for our first Book Club group read Selection for the month of August. It is also the W…more
[close] This is our winner for our first Book Club group read Selection for the month of August. It is also the Winner of our Book club group read for March 2015.

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What Members Thought

Aug 03, 2013 Richard Derus rated it really liked it

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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 pa Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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: A charming way to wile away a Saturday afternoon. It's a lovely story. Been told before, as what has not, but to call this little entertainment a groundbreaking work by a master is absurd.

Did I enjoy it? Oh yes. I liked it fine. As always in a Gaiman book, no one changes. Nameless narrator as child confronts horrible reality that all is not as it seems, he is not Safe, and the world can be whisked away in a flood of knowledge. He goes on being a child. Nameless adult narrator comes to terms with loss, only he doesn't really because he can't remember what it is he's coming to terms with.

The Norns, Urðr, Skuld, and Verðandi, are brilliant constructs, even if there is doubt about their separate and uninfluenced creation in Norse mythology and not grafts of the Greek Fates. The Norns, and their amazing well, describe all too clearly the experience of being alive in the elegant universe that quantum physics tells us lies under the pretty picture we lie ourselves to sleep with. Gaiman clearly Gets It. He expresses his clear-eyed and seemingly unflinching comprehension and acceptance of the unreality of the illusion we inhabit in this book. That's refreshing and it's pleasant.

But brilliant? Groundbreaking? Really now. James Joyce was brilliant. Proust was brilliant. Beckett's plays are brilliant. I will perform the osculum infame on Fox News if someone can make a respectable case for Gaiman being brilliant by those lights.

A worthy and amusing entertainment. There is nothing whatever wrong with that. ...more

135 likes · Like · see review

Aug 04, 2013 Diane S ☔ rated it liked it

This is the first Neil Gaiman novel I have ever read. It is one that I neither hated nor loved. It had some brilliant observations of childhood, some yucky passages (worm), some kind of scary scenes and a few characters I really liked. I guess this is not actually classified as a YA novel, but to me that seems to be a better fit than adult. It just read like a YA novel. Wasn't impressed but was'nt appalled, may try another Gaiman someday. ...more

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Feb 21, 2015 Candi rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy

“I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.” So states the seven-year old version of our narrator in this strange, dark and surreal novel by Neil Gaiman. One of the questions I have about this book is whether it was intended for a young adult or an adult reader. The simple, but mystical narration reads like a young adult novel, but certain components made me think maybe it was really meant for an adult audience. But “I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.” So states the seven-year old version of our narrator in this strange, dark and surreal novel by Neil Gaiman. One of the questions I have about this book is whether it was intended for a young adult or an adult reader. The simple, but mystical narration reads like a young adult novel, but certain components made me think maybe it was really meant for an adult audience. But then again, perhaps it “just was”.

I think there were many things you could take away from this book, depending on your own imagination and childhood experiences. I personally look back at my own childhood with a somewhat less than vivid imagination, but still with a dream-like quality. This is how I felt when reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane; as if I was privy to the narrator’s sensations of his past being like a vaguely sensed and remembered melancholic dream. “The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible…” How do we explain those hazy perceptions that we can’t quite recall? “A ghost-memory rises, here: a phantom moment, a shaky reflection in the pool of remembrance.” Do we put our own spin on certain things in our childhood that scare or confuse us, or even delight us? Do ponds become oceans, cruel adults become monsters, the deceased become terrifying ghosts, and special childhood friends become our champions and saviors?

This is my first Neil Gaiman novel and I enjoyed it. I was immediately drawn in at the beginning of the book, but felt a bit out of sorts during the middle section. I had a hard time allowing myself to be captured by the imaginative descriptions here but I certainly cannot claim these images were not creative. The last section of the book once again mesmerized me and left me wanting to know more. I felt for the lonely, bookish narrator, was disgusted by the worm, detested the “monsters”, and absolutely adored the three Hempstock women. I would like to know more about these otherworldly figures. I drew my own conclusions about these three, but we may all look at them a bit differently depending on what we as readers bring to the story. I would give this slightly peculiar but imaginative and thought-provoking book 3.5 stars and round up to a solid 4 stars. I look forward to reading my second Neil Gaiman in the future.
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Feb 03, 2015 DeAnna Knippling rated it really liked it

I don't know that this book can be judged as good or bad - oh, it is so very, annoyingly, disingenuously twee at the opening, with a grown man just bleeding with seven-year-old language.

But he must, and he spends the rest of the novel explaining why.

This book comes across as: "This is the mythologized story of how I became Neil Gaiman, and I am often a heartless ass, and I am sorry."

I got done and wanted to hug him. But how honest was it about that sorry? How intent was it about changing? Hard ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Dec 09, 2013 Elizabeth rated it it was amazing

Absolutely one of the best I have read.

It is story of all of us as we grow from a childhood. It is memories,fantasy, and dreams.

It is "Joyous and magical" and I would hope that everyone will read it. ...more

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