The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

            When I was a little kid I had many, many stuffed animals (enough to cover my bed twice over!), but one was special. He didn't have a name or gender (that I can recall) and his snow leopard spots had long since been worn away but he was my best friend and went with me everywhere. Then one day he was gone. I knew, just knew that my stuffed animals came alive and had adventures in the night, so I assumed that he had gotten lost and wasn't able to find his way back to me. After realizing how scared he must be I panicked and cried and begged my Dad to find him; we never did, but every night for the next month or so I left my window cracked in the hope that I'd wake up and he'd be waiting for me. Eventually I forgot why I was leaving my window cracked and closed it again without a thought and from that moment on I began to grow up. This book is that moment that leaves you hanging in the balance, it is the piece of me that still hopes one day I'll find my snow leopard even though the adult in me knows better. It's the kid in all of us who remembers that some things used to be different and struggles to find the magic that used to be in everything even as our adult brains try to shut it out.
           "I'm going to tell you something important. 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 the did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world."-pg 155

           I can't say that I wish I were still a child, because I don't, but I do sometimes with that the magic was still there. That I could touch it and know that it hadn't left or that I could somehow feel just a tiny piece of it for one more moment; this book does just that.
         "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."-pg 6.
This is the kind of book that makes you wonder (even just for a second) if your stuffed animals really did come to life and as you grew it just somehow got forgotten.

         In The Ocean At The End Of The Lane we never get to find out what our main characters name is but we do get to experience his childhood. His best friend is a girl named Lettie and when an evil demon (posing as his babysitter) moves into his house and starts to ruin his life Lettie and her grandmother have to help him put everything back together. This is not anything remotely like a children's book despite the fact that our unnamed narrator was only seven years old when the story takes place, it is dark and downright terrifying in some parts but it is honest and beautiful in it's own way. It's a type of coming of age story that anyone can understand, it's a story of discovering that the world is both awesome and horrible, and most importantly it's a story that makes us remember what it was like to be fearless and childish and surrounded by magics that we can't comprehend.
        "I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me."- pg 198