Scan barcode
A review by midici
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
5.0
"Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. People are much more complicated than that. It's true of everybody."
This is my favourite Neil Gaiman book so far. It's as though he took all his intensity, his wonderful, vivid, haunting prose, and purpose, and stuffed it into as small a space as possible.
Children often know things that adults don't. They tend to lose those things as they grow, but every once in a while the mysteries of childhood come back to us. The boy in this novel meets a remarkable family: Lettie Hempstock, the eleven year old who walks between worlds, and banishes things that pass through, her mother Mrs. Hempstock, and Old Mrs. Hempstock ,her grandmother.
He revisits the Hempstock's farm as a middle age man and remembers, suddenly, the few days as a child when he first met the Hempstocks and all of the secrets of his childhood that surrounded that event.
This is my favourite Neil Gaiman book so far. It's as though he took all his intensity, his wonderful, vivid, haunting prose, and purpose, and stuffed it into as small a space as possible.
Children often know things that adults don't. They tend to lose those things as they grow, but every once in a while the mysteries of childhood come back to us. The boy in this novel meets a remarkable family: Lettie Hempstock, the eleven year old who walks between worlds, and banishes things that pass through, her mother Mrs. Hempstock, and Old Mrs. Hempstock ,her grandmother.
He revisits the Hempstock's farm as a middle age man and remembers, suddenly, the few days as a child when he first met the Hempstocks and all of the secrets of his childhood that surrounded that event.