Name: Maureen's review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Item: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Rating: 4
Author: Maureen

A Novel

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Neil Gaiman

THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 'BOOK OF THE YEAR' AN ACCLAIMED WEST END THEATRE PRODUCTION ***** 'Neil Gaiman's entire body of work is a feat of elegant sorcery. He writes with such assurance and originality that the reader has no choice but to surrender to a waking dream' ARMISTEAD MAUPIN 'Some books just swallow you up, heart and soul' JOANNE HARRIS 'Summons both the powerlessness and wonder of childhood, and the complicated landscape of memory and forgetting' GUARDIAN --- 'My favourite response to this book is when people say, 'My childhood was nothing like that - and it was as if I was reading about me' NEIL GAIMAN --- This is what he remembers, as he sits by the ocean at the end of the lane: A dead man on the back seat of the car, and warm milk at the farmhouse. An ancient little girl, and an old woman who saw the moon being made. A beautiful housekeeper with a monstrous smile. And dark forces woken that were best left undisturbed. They are memories hard to believe, waiting at the edges of things. The recollections of a man who thought he was lost but is now, perhaps, remembering a time when he was saved . . . NEIL GAIMAN. WITH STORIES COME POSSIBILITIES. --- **Includes an interview with Neil Gaiman on creating the world of the novel**

Emiley Jones

When adults fight children, adults always win.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. 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.

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Izaac Richards

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. 

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. 

I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. 

I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway. 

cedar winslow

Will she be the same?" The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe."Nothing's ever the same, she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling, And people change as much as oceans.

I wished I could purr too. I would have purred then.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Illustrated Edition

Ocean at the End of the Lane

Amalie Elisabeth

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy. 

Revna

She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

bianca

You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.

“You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.”

A flash of resentment. It’s hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having, if not died, then having given up her life. It wasn’t fair.

Nothing’s ever the same. Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived.

Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truthis, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

I had strange dreams in that house, that night. I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.

I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?

venus

Dominik Hofer

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE is a novel about memory and magic and survival, about the power of stories and the darkness inside each of us, created by the unparalleled imaginative power of Neil Gaiman.

Maureen

"Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands."

***

Great parallels between adults and children. Gaiman assumes the role of a 7-year-old, and he does it well—it's interesting how the boy was nameless 'til the end. 4 stars because I felt the worldbuilding could've been fleshed out a bit more. Despite the good wrap up, there were questions left unanswered. Overall, it lived up to the hype and its Goodreads rating is well-deserved.

i read this years ago when it released. i will read it again someday. this books made me creeped out, cry, and renewed my passion for reading for my own joy of reading. if you were an avid reader as a child and miss the feeling of being swept away by fantastic worlds, please give this a try. 

colie b

Gigi V

I didn't get this book. I really liked Neverwhere. Was this a children's book?

Paula Plaza Ponte 

Awesome book. Love how Gaiman shows us sensitivity and the proper way to embrace the sadness.

Ada kuzey 

Çok değişikti. Normal hayatın içine olağanüstülükler katılmıştı. En sevdiğim kısımlar kedinin olduğu kısımlardı. Araya zaman girip başka zaman okumam gerekse bile kitaptan hiç kopmadım. Güzel bir kitaptı.

Colton Ray

I didn't really care for this book for a number of reasons. I am a fan of "magical-realism" -- a genre that juxtaposes fantasy and reality in ways that bring out the most interesting aspects of both. And this book does fall under that genre; however, I feel that it falls short of greatness.

Neil Gaiman is widely heralded as a great fantasy author. I tried to read one of his books (Interworld) as a teen and never finished it. I almost didn't finsish this one, but it was so short, I figured I'd just slog on through.

The story has a nice premise - a middle-aged man is visiting his old neighborhood and digs up some strange past memories. However, despite all the fantasy aspects, the plot largely whittles down to two kids trying to get rid of their babysitter.

The first thing that irritated me was the magical religious jargon that the characters use. It's foreign to the main character at first, as well, but little of it is ever truly explained. If you're going to build a world where there are birds that eat reality, twelve-year-old goddesses that live next door, magical grannies that can alter time and space, and evil spirits who seduce fathers and abuse kids, at least give me a little explanation of how all these things came to be. I mean, the ideas are cool, but I need a little backstory of their relationship to each other before I can suspend that much belief.

That's another thing. Gaiman's fairy tale aesthetic is overworked, in that there is almost nothing human to relate to. The Hempstock women are not human, Ursula is not human, the main character's family really are not given enough page time for me to particularly care about them, and the main character just felt very cardboard to me, only a mouthpiece to voice this strange story about gods and myths and stuff. It made me feel like I felt when trying to read Tolkien's Silmarillion -- that there is nothing here for me to relate to.

As much as I love strange, weird story ideas with a magical-realism bend to them, they're very easy to mess up. As in, overdoing it on the weirdness to the point where the story dries up. It all amounts to something akin to a strange dream. There's fun in the concepts, but there's really no substance underneath.

Another thing I have to comment on is the writing. There were some nice turns of phrase, but in general, the writing was rather dull. I found myself skimming by the end, and considering the book is only a little under 180 pages, that's not a good thing. In fact, the story would have benefitted greatly from some trimming down and maybe could have been included in some short story collection. I think I would have enjoyed it better in that context.

As it is, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is not a bad read, and neither is Gaiman an untalented writer. However, this story just felt too slight, ambiguous, and left me feeling nothing.

Sarah Sammis

maitha mana

I've decided to re-read this book, as I was captivated by the illustrations. This feels like the perfect book to read for Fall, which I should have waited for. The book is comforting and also disturbing, in a way that nightmares feel scary, despite not being real. But that doesn't make it less scary. The ocean that is just a pond, which is really a world of its own, with creatures of shadows, which seep into our own reality.

Kind of like a British version of spirited away? Kind of

Margo Koss

Sarah T

This was an interesting story about childhood, fantasy, and trauma. It was pretty sad and upsetting at times, and there wasn't very much character focus for me to relate to; so, it wasn't the most enjoyable book I've ever read. I thought, overall, it was meaningful and well-written, though.

Deepika Ramesh

This review was written on 22-March-2015

Coraline was my first Neil Gaiman book. It followed an extraordinary child, who fought a tall something that looked like her mother. Her parents were imprisoned by that thing in a house, which was an eerie replica of Coraline's. And, there was only a door between the real and the strange world. The children's book was well-supplied with dreamlike stuff. Cardboard houses. Talking animals. A monster sort of a thing with a pair of buttons for eyes. Some scenes were arresting, surreal. The Ocean at the End of the Lane too is beautifully bizarre as Coraline.

I meet the protagonist, when he drives to a random place, to take some time off from a funeral. In a while, he realises that he is on his way to a lane where he lived for a while. When he was seven, at a farmhouse at the end of lane, he had met Lettie Hempstock, her mother, and her grandmother. There was a pond. Lettie had called it an ocean.

About forty years after his first rendezvous with them, he goes back to the pond, and recalls the series of scary events that took place at the lane. His memory flickers every once in a while. His narration is unreliable; but, it's never dull and unbelievable. In a world, where an ancient woman remembers the moon being made, where a girl has been 11-years-old for about a billion years, nothing out-of-the-ordinary appears dubious.

At several junctures, I was thinking of Murakami, for Gaiman has partially repeated some of the themes explored in Coraline, quite like the former whose motifs are popular. A lonely, neglected child. A thing that has got a ragged-cloth for a body. A cat that follows its human at all times. Random acts of kindness by strangers. And, trance-like scenes. There is a pattern. It's predictable. But, not mundane.

Despite the intuitive writing in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Coraline seemed more striking. Maybe, it's just me. I am a sucker for children's literature. Some of the elements borrowed from Coraline - the ragged-cloth monster, for instance - might not go well with this book, because I needed something that's more hideous and frightening. But Gaiman shines where he explores the most touchy theme - memories. (I love the way Murakami writes about memories too.)

Those are the parts in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I see myself relishing more. Even while I was reading the book, I stopped there and ran through some of those passages many times, heaving big sighs and losing myself in reveries.

And, it looks like I am beginning to like Gaiman more. The writer's style is charmingly simple, yet lyrical; the ideas... mind-bending, and poignant.

Some favourite passages here:
 I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

"Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”
Coraline left me feeling content. I knew everything was okay in her world. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, for unfathomable reasons, made me melancholic. I wanted to know more about the Hempstocks, and Lettie's ocean. And the life of Hempstocks itself would make an intriguing story. When one has been living since the time the moon was made, I want to know if she is tired... tired of immortality.

Annika Arguemore

Best Neil Gaiman novel yet.

His approach towards this one isn't as fantastical as the others. It's got more elements from real life, which makes it more relatable and fun to read. It touches upon several ideologies that one would have thought of as a child. It's just truly an amazing story. I recommend everyone to read it, as my roommate have recommended me.

★★★★ // Perhaps there are several ways to read this book (a myth, a fairy tale for grown-ups, etc.) but to me, it was about longing for innocence. As kids, we are conditioned to believe that we will be great when we grow old. Our lives are being shaped towards that one particular image. We're going to be adults who have things figured out. The idea of stumbling, much less feeling sad and momentarily lost, is not acceptable. But the truth is, we are far from being perfect. Maybe we even make much more mistakes as adults because we no longer have that innocence that allows us to be carefree. We're afraid to make mistakes as adults because it's much more difficult to be forgiven for it—whether by other people or yourself. The more we're afraid of doing certain things, the more we end up doing them.


  Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.


This story is constructed around a series of 'weird' events that may or may not be real. Just as how most kids would be talking about a friend or a place or anything that they witness, and most adults would dismiss as something imagined. It's almost like a long dream, or maybe it was a memory. No one ever really and completely remembers their childhood. It's always this vague picture. Still, much of what we went through as a child comes back to us one way or another later on in life in different forms. Different, but recognizable. At times, they help us cope with whatever we're going through. Other times, they're like monsters that we can't seem to run away from.


  I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from the things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.


Well, you know, we live on with the memories we wish we could lose.

Zita Azlina

Three magical things that ALWAYS come out in gaiman's book is his writing, his allegories (only if there is any, because i'm an overanalyzer and most of the time i'm wrong), and the fact that this book is better in its aftertaste; but pretty dull while being get through. I love the plot, of course. The characters is pretty easy to be symphatized (I mean obviously, it's written in an 'I', as a child). But maybe this kind of tale is just not my preferences. But the overall book is amazing. It might not be my favourite but it certainly is a worth reading. I just LOVE LOVE LOVE the writing and all the beautiful quotes in it. Very character-driven and many inwards perspective, might not be yours if you are looking for some heavy plot books. 

Truly magical! 3.7/5

erika s

I thought this was so good, the narration and voice was so convincing and the world gaiman created was so vivid and real and magical

fris🐝

clever and sweet and sad! i loved moments of this book, specifically the emphasis on the complexities of memory. tho i will say, i can’t get behind a child’s first person narration But the voice was believable so..i’ll give him that!

༺ kat ༻

Jaden Nelson

This felt like literary magic and one of the most genuinely interesting and incredibly written stories I’ve read. I listened on audiobook which I recommend because Neil’s narration is perfect and it helped make the book even more active in my imagination than I think it might have if I read the print. Go read the book.

i dont really know what i just read but i sure read it quickly! some cute aspects but i just didn’t click with it :(

Aine Meehan

I enjoyed this book, it was an easy read. I was a bit dissapointed that it was so short because I really liked the characters. I think it read more like teen fiction than adult, and it was a bit obviously a short story that grew longer! That being said I'm glad I read it and I enjoyed it.

Melissa Palmer

Book #59 Read in 2013
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

A middle aged man returns to his childhood home for a funeral. He begins a journey down memory lane, where he remembers a scary monster who tried to possess him, a family of witch-like woman who helped save him and the tribulations of a growing boy. This book was in turn creepy and a coming of age story. It had horror, a paranormal aspect, mystery and great writing. The main character was interesting. The Hempstock women were an interesting crew of powerful females. This was a decent read. 

http://melissasbookpicks.blogspot.com

Denaiir

I listened to this on audiobook and enjoyed the narration (by the author).
The story was well-written and I liked the general atmosphere of the book, however the fact that the narrator was 7 meant that the story was not very high on the epic scale. The boy is a great character and at his level the story is action-packed, but overall it did not seem like the stakes were very high.
I will probably pick some more Neil Gaiman up, but more adult-oriented ones.

I did like this book, but I feel to old while reading this. Just seems to be written for a younger reader.

sharkie

a child’s experience of trauma and grief, composed through magic and monsters, nice work again mr gaiman

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The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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