I received a hard copy of this book from my husband. This is the second book I read by Neil Gaiman and I was once again teleported to a far away land, yet very very familiar. There’s a lot of melancholia in Neil Gaiman’s words. I read it while I was at home, on the land where I grew up and where I recall some of my happiest childhood moments.

“We make pilgrimage to the landmarks of our childhood, in vain, to revive somehow the magic and wonder of youth.”

For a few hours I was a child again. The child that used to find refugee and comfort in books, especially when I was bored or lonely or scared. The child running free in the nature, bored at listening to the sound of flies, staring at the “ocean at the end of the lane”, letting my imagination entertain me.

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”

Neil is a master at making you feel what the character feels…As if, for a second there, you are the character experiencing it all. Take for instance this scene, where he describes the main character pulling a worm from a whole in his foot.

I will repeat what probably most of the readers have already said. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is childhood and you can only understand its meaning as an adult. These are some of my favorite quotes:

“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.”

“Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”

“Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t I don’t People are much more complicated than that.”

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”

On a different but equally important note, I must say that it’s the kind of book to read on paper. Even better if it’s the hard cover beautifully illustrated version, with drawings accompanying perfectly the emotions of each page. Sometimes the illustrations of a book feel as if they’re just meant to fill in pages, but here I could actually feel they played together, the same tune.