Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Published: June 18, 2013
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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 Laneis 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
Gaiman’s Coraline is the first novel I’ve read when I was a child and the last book I’ve ever read of him, mainly because my taste in books have changed and mostly I only read Young Adult novels. But since the title of this book is very intriguing and it’s written by him, I gave it a shot and alas I’m not disappointed at all.
Here comes a story of a middle
aged man wandering to his old home and somehow he lingered to the Hempstock’s
farm house, it is where he usually goes when he was a child. As he sits by the
pond; which his old friend proclaim it as an ocean, all of his memories came
back to him.
Reading this book is a great
refresher for me because I hardly read fantasy novels these days. At first I didn’t
even know that this is a fantasy novel until I reached the part when
the main character is experiencing strange things; I might sound stupid but
yeah.
There’s something familiar about
this book but I can’t quite point what it is, something good. Maybe Déjà vu? I
really think that I’ve read this book a long time ago. Well I think Old Mrs.
Hempstock is right, “Different people
remember things differently, you’ll not get any two people to remember anything
the same.” His writings are surely astounding; you will get blown by it,
realizing that you are in fact living in both fantasy and reality.
This book gave me the idea that
not all of the memories are completely forgotten; some of them are still
inside us, waiting to be remembered. It also gave me many realizations in life that at some point, growing up is quite frightening.
I
actually felt nostalgic while reading this, like my childhood memories rushed
through my mind. All of it. The weird things that happened to me, the pretending
that my cousins and I did for fun, the imaginations we shared. This novel is
short but it’s a great read, if you’re looking for a great book to read in one
sitting, this might be for you.
Oh and after you read this
review, I recommend you to go to the nearest local bookstore and buy this book,
you will not regret it, I promise.
PS.
I really love the cover. I can
stare at it like forever, seriously.
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