Just Finished Reading Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane

British fantasy/science fiction writer Neil Gaiman is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors.  Currently I'm reading through one of his "juniors" series titled InterWorld...maybe that one is a tad too juvenile...but I just finished reading a more adult novel: his 2013 The Ocean at the End of the Lane...

In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a man in his late forties returns to where he lived as a seven-year-old boy forty year earlier, in a rural Sussex area (in England, of course).   While walking down the lane connecting his former home (now long demolished) and its end, where the Hempstocks lived, he begins to gradually remember his past.  Finally, looking out on the Hempstock's pond, he recalls that little Lettie Hempstock, a girl four years his senior, referred to the pond as an "ocean"...and the past memories flood in, launching this tale of childhood adventures, fears, and regrets...

It's always a bit difficult to know how much to tell in a book review and how much to leave out.  Maybe it's just better to give some general impressions of mine and leave the story's outcome to you, the prospective reader.  One sense I got from reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane is that it initially feels as if it belongs in the "young adult" genre of fiction...like Divergent, Twilight, or Hunger Games...but the themes embedded within are much more adult in nature, once you get past all of the magic, fantasy, and adventure.   I also picked up that Gaiman was writing about the helpless feeling that children often get when they have to interact with grown-ups, who often wield so much power over them and insist on always being "right".  Whoa...that one struck a strong chord with me as I recall, over the course of my own childhood, how much I deeply distrusted...and even feared...adults.  There is a sinister housekeeper reminiscent of the wicked nanny who takes over the household in the movie The Omen, and later in the story appear monstrous flying entities who "clean things up" and are remarkably similar to those in Stephen King's The Langoliers...

The Ocean at the End of the Lane was published in 2013 and won numerous awards for Neil Gaiman.  It is a disturbing novel in that, while it seems like a child's fantasy tale on the surface, there is some pretty deep stuff underlying it all.  Why not try it out and see for yourself?