The Docket: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Hello, bookworms and moths! Our book club's next book has been decided, and we will be venturing into not-YA with Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This one has been sitting on my shelf since its release, so I am glad to have an excuse to finally get into it! I've heard very good things about this one from pretty much all corners, so hopefully we'll continue the pattern after Code Name Verity and the group will enjoy it. Here's the blurb from Goodreads:

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.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

Yay Neil Gaiman!!! And as an added bonus, since Ocean is fairly short and will be for October/November rather than just one month, we decided to throw in his recent book for young readers, Fortunately, the Milk, too. Here's the blurb for that one:

"I bought the milk," said my father. "I walked out of the corner shop, and heard a noise like this: T h u m m t h u m m. I looked up and saw a huge silver disc hovering in the air above Marshall Road."

"Hullo," I said to myself. "That's not something you see every day. And then something odd happened."

Find out just how odd things get in this hilarious story of time travel and breakfast cereal, expertly told by Newbery Medalist and bestselling author Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Skottie Young.

Like with Code Name Verity, after we finish reading the books we'll have a post with our thoughts where we'd love for you to join in and discuss with us. Time for a visit to the library or bookstore to start tracking down some Neil Gaiman!