The Ocean at the End of the Lane Review

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.

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.

If this is what childhood fantasy is like, I need more. Never knew this was a genre I could be interested in. A fantastic story, amazingly well written in first person voice.

At about 156 pages, it’s a short read. But no way I would have expected to finish it as quickly as I did. It’s a real page turner and a very difficult book to put down. I won’t dive into the story as I usually do for other reviews because I don’t think I can give it justice. Just take dive in this Ocean and you won’t be disappointed.

That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together

I am going to be sharing my progress on the books going forward. It shouldn’t be considered as an indication of the quality of the book as my reading habits might vary depending on my workload. But it is usually a good indication of how interestingly the book progresses.