Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Publisher: William Morrow Books

Source: Borrowed

Pages: 181

Series: Standalone

Release Date: June 18, 2013

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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.

I tried really really hard to like this book. I really did. Everyone was posting such awesome reviews about it saying how much they loved the book and how awesome it was. However, I thought the complete opposite. To tell you the truth, I had a VERY hard time finishing it. 

I found that the story wasn't all that interesting. Sure, there were some parts where you were like WHOA! but that was very rare. There weren't any characters that you cuold really "connect" with. And I thought that the story wasn't very original. I feel like something like this has happened before in another book or movie. 

I really didn't like how descriptive everything was. No matter how small it was, it had a huge and in depth description. I didn't find that necessary at all.

I feel like the story literally drug on and on and on.. yet the book was super short. It left me very confused and half the time I had no idea I was really confused.

Overall, I was really disappointed with this book. Like I said, I was really wanting to like this book. I'm really disappointed that I didn't.