Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane
A new Neil Gaiman novel is, like, an EVENT. Frankly, I wasn't sure this could even remotely live up to expectations, especially since it's been a while since I LOVED one of his books (though it's also been a while since he's written a book for adults, and historically I like his adult work much more than the works aimed at a younger audience), and this one is on the shorter side. All this is to say that, actually, I liked this quite a bit! It's about a man returning home to England for a funeral, when he wanders down the road from his childhood home--and is suddenly flooded with memories of when he was seven, and befriended an unusual 11-year-old girl. It's a Neil Gaiman story, so you can probably extrapolate some stuff from that. The body of the story--the events the two of them have to deal with--is fine, but it's the end that kind of sold me on this. It turns into a meditation on memory and fantasy and childhood nostalgia, and filled me with a bittersweet sort of feeling. PLUS there are kittens and conversational Yiddish. Gaiman is clearly drawing on his own childhood with this one, which makes it somehow more powerful than his bigger works about gods and monsters. A-.
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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released on June 18th.
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