Short but Sweet
When you play Dungeons and Dragons one of the things you do outside of the game is makes characters. It really doesn’t matter if you’re a DM or a player, because a DM needs characters, and players need extra characters, in case death or worse occurs.
In the acknowledgements of this book, Neil Gaiman talks about how the Hempstocks as characters have been in his head for a while, and he needed a story for them, which he finds in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. They are certainly the most shining star of the novel, with Gaiman’s writing style playing a supporting role. The story is simple enough on the surface: bad thing takes over, must be stopped. The spice of the story comes from the little details that Gaiman throws in about the Hempstocks. How they’ve probably been around for eons, there are other dimensions or something like that, there are other creatures who can come to this world, pacts, treaties, agreements have all been made. These things get maybe one line of dialogue in the whole story, and I’m totally ok with that. Some people might want a whole 1,000 page book with explanations of The Mouse Wars, but the fact that Gaiman only mentions the mouse wars as a one-off really pleases me. It seems like, for a story that is so sad, (we’ll get to how depressing the main character is) Gaiman is having fun with it. Anything involving the Hempstocks is so much fun to read. And making the main character a little boy who is a friend of Lettie, the youngest (“youngest”) Hempstock, means that Gaiman can get away with the Hempstocks being mysterious or not making sense, because a lot doesn’t make sense to the main character. He’s 7.
He might be the one of the saddest 7 year olds out there too. No one comes to his birthday party, he has one friend, his sister doesn’t like him, his cat gets killed, he almost drowns, and SPOILER, literally gets his heart ripped out. It makes reading about his goings on, especially early in the book, tough. I’d rather start almost right from the introduction of Lettie and the Hempstocks. Maybe that’s just Gaiman’s writing though. This is the first book I’ve read of his, and he has a style that comes across as dark-fairytale, so maybe that’s why.
Once you get past the dreary beginning, this book surprisingly doesn’t stop. The Hempstocks are constantly doing things that the main character understands maybe 10% of. Which is fine with me, actually. It allows room for the imagination to run wild, which I find more interesting than a 30 page compendium of fleas and varmints.
This novel avoids that, though. It’s barebones in a good way. A bedtime story about a boy becoming brave through the help of some friends. I’m sure there’s some subtext I’m missing, but even if that’s the only thing I take from it, I’m happy. This didn’t really blow my socks off, but it was short, interesting, and fun.
3/5 - perfectly serviceable, not lighting the world on fire, so it’s Evan Turner, who is one of the most average NBA players according to Google.
the villain making a surprise appearance