The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by
Neil Gaiman
-181 pages-
Discussion Highlights:
Fantastic book! Great story, imagery, and themes. A favorite by everyone and the best discussion so far! While a book for adults, it still had those elements of fairy tales we heard and read as a child. It even left us with questions. Whose funeral was the main character attending? Why doesn't he remember what happened outside of the property? Are the Hempstocks really three different people? How was his relationship with his parents after everything went back to normal?
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 Lane is 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.
Discussion Highlights:
Next Month’s Host and Book:
by
Jess Riley
-274 pages-
Our 7th monthly meeting will be September 26, 2013! See you then!
