52 Weeks 52 Books ~ THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE ~ Week Ending December 9, 2013

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE was my first Neil Gaiman book, and it was a strange and often chilling journey into childhood dreams--and nightmares.  Because it is a story about children and seen through the eyes of a child, it seemed to be more of a juvenile book--but not one that you'd want to read to children. It's myth, fantasy and horror, a fairy tale.  It's the reality of the helplessness of childhood, and some very astute views of adults:

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” 

 and

 "Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences."  

Highly recommended!  ~ Katherine

"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." ~ from the Publisher