The Ocean at the End of the Lane

This book for me is hard to quantify. Overall, I did enjoy it. The characters are interesting, the story is hauntingly intriguing, and the writing is lyrically wonderful. But the book itself feels like it's trapped in a sort of limbo between being too long and detailed to be a short story, but with too little depth to be considered a proper novel. To me, it felt like it was short story that was expanded into being not quite a novel, and left with too little ‘umph' to carry it along. I enjoyed the read, but the lack of explanation and overall depth left me feeling somewhat disappointed.

Would I recommend this book? Perhaps, but only if it were checked out from a library for free, or gotten used. It's a very, very quick read, and not worth the cost of the trade paperback in my opinion. I'm glad I put off buying “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” long enough that I ended up getting it as the cheaper Kindle version after I got my Paperwhite. This being the only book by Neil Gaiman I've read, I'm not quite sure what to think overall, and can't properly compare it to his other books. I imagine it will be a fair amount of time before I pick up any of the rest of his works based off of this one. I'm glad I've heard this story, but it's not one I'll ever come back too.