The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book surprised me. It’s marketed as a novel, an adult fairy tale, yet it reads more like a young-adult short story – all well and good apart from the adult novel price tag. That complaint aside, it’s a good read, some nice ideas and decent writing as you’d expect from Neal Gaiman. I wanted to love it, but as the ending approached, the story felt constrained in a straight jacket. There were so many characters and subplots dying to be released, to be given more space, but in the end they remained trapped in this quick read. Maybe a follow-on is in the works – fingers crossed.