The Ocean at the End of the Lane

You’ll love this book and won’t be able to put it down. It’s a delicious fantasy and completely thought-provoking.  It’ll make you happy and make you feel less alone. It’ll make you love Neil Gaiman a little more than maybe you already do, and that’s something I didn’t think was possible.  The story  takes place in Sussex, England. A man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he grew up in is gone, he is mesmerized by the farm at the end of the road, where when he was seven years old, he met a most amazing girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, but as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d always said was an ocean) behind the run down old farmhouse, his past comes flooding back. And it is a past too frightening and dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at the farm at the end of the road.  As a little boy, the darkness of that death captured him because it was something so scary and totally unimaginable to a little boy. But Lettie was comforting and wise beyond her years and she promised to protect him, no matter what.