Warning - This Review Contains Spoilers - Spoilers Section Will Be Warned Ahead Of Time
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
"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."
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a standalone fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman.
I am conflicted about this book. On the one hand, listening to Neil Gaiman tell this story definitely made the reading experience more enjoyable. If I were to read the book physically, I probably would have either been really bored or would have put the book down. Part of that reasoning was because the story was just not very captivating, and the other half is because of events that happen in the book.
Spoilers Ahead
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I was incredibly uncomfortable listening to the MC's dad try and drown him in the bathtub. That was a breaking point for me but I pushed through and continued the story. However, later on in the story, the family's memories get erased so the dad doesn't remember the fact that he tried to drown his own son and I was not okay with it. He basically got a free pass for trying to commit filicide.
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