The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman is fantastical story about an adult remembering events from his childhood.

I picked this one up when I saw it at a local thrift shop. I almost started reading it time and time again, but something kept making me wait. When the book was chosen for my book club, I finally gave it a read.

Unfortunately, this one fell very flat for me.

My thoughts:
There were so many things about this book that I could have loved, but they all just didn't have much oomph. For example, I normally would have loved learning more about all of the fantastical elements as the boy was exposed to them. I would have normally loved the mystery of trying to figure out what was going on. And of course I would have loved the darker tone that was hiding just under the surface throughout, but only made itself known a handful of times.

But I was bored. So very bored.

Almost everything just fell so darn flat for me. I didn't think it was very well written at all. The pacing dragged. It was very repetitive. I didn't care about any of the characters because I didn't feel that they were very well developed... which of course can work well in some books, but it didn't work for me here.

If this wasn't the book that I was hosting for my book club, I wouldn't have finished it.

However, to end on a lighter note: I did enjoy all of the little bits and pieces that hinted toward other things. Some of these were quite obvious from the start, but others only sank in once I had finished the book. This is definitely one that I could see people re-reading simply to catch more of those instances.

I absolutely love stories that move in a full circle! So I really loved the last sentence of the book.

Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.

My favorite passages:
Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

We picked some pea pods, opened them all and ate the peas inside. Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting.

My final thoughts:
Unfortunately a miss for me. Though I can definitely see why others absolutely love this one.