$3.99 on kindle US. Today only! 2-4-18This was a magical story both happy and dark. I loved it so much! And Neil Gaiman did a wonderful job of reading his own book ❤️Once a boy befriended a girl named Lettie Hempstock, her mother and grandmother and nothing was ever the same again.....There are beautiful and horrible things in this world and we find these things inside this book A boy that is coming of age in a world we know nothing about and everything about.... It did make me sad but you have

Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. This book is childhood.Are all Neil Gaiman books like this? So beautifully, hauntingly nostalgic? I confess, this is my first; but right now I am logging into amazon to make sure it isn't my last. I have one criticism, which is that this book isn't really an adult book. The few adult scenes felt ad

Sitting down to write a review of this book, I don't quite know where to start. I was going to quote a passage that I particularly loved. But no good can come of that. Once I opened that door, where would I stop quoting? So let me say this. I genuinely loved this book. I look forward to reading it again. I will buy copies for my family as gifts. I will listen to the audio and lament my own lack of narrative skill. I will gush about it to strangers. In short, it is a Neil Gaiman novel. There is t...

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.” This is a book that teaches us that we should never stop dreaming, that we should never stop seeing oceans in ponds and that we should never, ever, stop seeing better worlds in the things we read.The pond that was an ocean bespeaks the level of optimism that is inherent with childhood dreams. Everything seems better. Everything seems bigger and grander. Imagination makes the ordin

"All monsters are scared.That's why they're monsters." 48 hours ago, when I read the last page for the first time, I had this strange, sad feeling. Like I had come to the end of something beautiful without really comprehending the beauty of it until the last minute.Which is why it took me a re-read to realize how brilliant this book is. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is childhood in 181 pages.Short. Sweet. Magical. Scary. Real.There is a reason this book is labelled as "adult" and it has no

I really, really wanted to like this book...but like so many Gaiman novels, it fell flat. Like pancake-flat. Maybe this one is a dud because we follow the least-interesting character in the entire book. Honestly, I couldn't be the only one who would've preferred to get the perspectives of the witches. Or the worm-creature? Or even the spiteful cat. Why Gaiman chose such a young, bland character to be his main, I will never know. I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I w...

Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but aren’t. I turned 7 early in third grade. It was a memorable school year because I had for a teacher a nun with a reputation. Sister Evangelista was about 5 foot nuthin’, and symmetrical. If the what’s black and white, black and white, black and white – a nun

In the acknowledgments section of his latest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman admits that the project was initially meant to be a short story, which grew to be a novel - not a very long novel, but a novel nonetheless. For fans it was big news, as it would be his first novel for adults since 2005's Anansi Boys.I was never really into Gaiman's work - I wasn't crazy about American Gods or Neverwhere and Coraline, all of which are routinely mentioned as fan favorites. I loved Sta...

Everything you need to know about "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" is right there in the title! The Ocean it alludes to is deep (fathom-deep as the true meanings of family & love & death); blue (icy like the Coraline's motherspider antagonist-- the demonic Nanny McPhee in the middle of the story; cold like the rigidity of death, the panic of succumbing to childhood traumas); vast (like the leitmotifs spread out in elegant splendor along the narrative, tokens of the writer's impressive & grand

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil GaimanThe Ocean at the End of the Lane is a 2013 novel by British author Neil Gaiman. The work follows an unnamed man who returns to his hometown for a funeral and remembers events that began forty years earlier.At the age of 7, the unnamed boy is facing many crises, not the least of which is his parents have let out his room to lodgers in order to raise extra money. When one lodger commits suicide in the family car, the boy’s life changes in subtle and str...

It is the first book I read by Neil Gaiman but I am sure it will not be the last. It is creepy and beautiful and hopeful and melancholic.It is a book about the innocence and helplessness of childhood, about memories and also about so much more as it contains a lot of universal truths so beautifully written.It is an adult story even if most of it is narrated through the eyes of a seven years old boy. I loved the definition of adults from the book: Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside...

While in his home town for a funeral, a middle aged man drives to the site of his parents' former home and visits visits the farm at the end of the road, where he remembers some curious events from when he was seven...First off, I'll get the gripes out of the way. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is marketed as Gaiman's first adult novel since Anansi Boys. It feels a lot more like a young adult novel, more akin to the Graveyard Book or Coraline than American Gods. Secondly, it's only 175 pages l...

Can a pond being an ocean? Sure! Why not? DON'T THINK IN LIMITATIONS BUT POSIBILITIES Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. Once you can get to accept that a pond likely can be a whole ocean, you will then enjoy this wonderful book.I think that Neil Gaiman, the author, was a genius even deciding the length of the book.Sure, the initial intention was to make a short story that ended inton being a novel, but at 181 pages of length, it's most likely a novella.Howev

An unnamed man comes back to attend a funeral in his hometown. He stops by his neighbor’s house where he ponders events that happened when he was seven years old. During his youth, he witnesses a tragedy which ignites a series of events, much like the first domino to fall in a set. His neighbor, an eleven-year-old girl, Lettie, promises to keep him safe. Will she be able to keep that promise?This was an enchanting story that reminded me very much of childhood. In the story, Lettie talks about ho...