The Ocean at The End of The Lane.

[Austin]

Lettie Hempstock shares in her friend, a view of life that is unbound by time. It looks at the world through the eyes of the unreal and has the reader questioning, "what and why" in this novel. In this novel you follow an unnamed boy, which only adds to the surrealism in the novel. The Ocean is a chain of events that slowly unfolds and unravels the emotions and experiences with everything ordinary, through the supernatural. What happened to this boy that was brought back by the Ocean? and how did an Ocean get to the end of the lane? A microcosm of childhood experience, fear, unknowing, the mystical and wild. This is a fantasy novel that was great at really making you believe in what was going on, it wasn't super out there, but still had good fantasy elements.

This was the first fantasy novel that I have read and this made beginning this book slightly tough for me, I almost had to shift my way of thinking and comprehension to understand what was actually going on. After that, the book really took off, It was paced nicely as to not be too quick; there is a lot of scenery and the whole of the world is explained, which needs to be taken in. I was thrown off a little by some of the language that was used because it was set in Sussex England.

I'm pretty sure that I enjoyed the book. It was a very emotion and experience provoking book and had me thinking of what existed before I know when time started. This mans world is continuously ending through time, it's fantastic that the ocean brought back all the wildest memories. Could this have actually happened and this is actually a fantasy experience or is it a metaphor for a larger idea? I couldn't pin it down because the book was written to be a flashback and through the eyes of Lettie Hempstock's grandmother, each person remembers the past differently from one another, "Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not." (173)