Audiobook read by Neil Gaiman
Age: Middle School-High School

"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" (Goodreads review).

Gaiman addresses the idea of the infallible authority of adults through a short and harrowing tale about a magical family as seen through the eyes of a 7-year-old boy. I feel like I didn't give this book the attention that it deserved as I listened to it over a longer period of time while doing chores around the house. I think when you enter Gaiman's worlds, you need to be fully invested in the sinister hopefulness that he weaves throughout his tales.