Crosspost: Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

My instinct was to write this review longhand, which probably won't mean much to you (except that I am old), but says something to me about the emotional space I was in after finishing the book. I took out my boarding pass, thinking I'd write on the back, not wanting to put it into my just-started professional notebook (it's teal, and has a fabric placeholder, and only has writing on one page -- a to-do list, most of which remains to be done). That was my instinct but, as it turned out, I'd left my pen in my backpack, which was safely stowed in the overhead compartment, and which I did not feel like retrieving just to get a pen. So, I "wrote" on my phone, in an app designed to look like a pad of yellow paper. I like the lines, but I miss the feeling of pen, and the imaginary lines on the imaginary page made me think of Lettie Hempstock saying that nothing is really what it looks like on the outside. 

I read The Ocean at the End of the Lane in less than the time it takes to fly from New Orleans to New York. I started during takeoff and when I finished, and checked the map, it told me that we were somewhere over North Carolina. It was a quick read, and the story is fairly simple: a man returns to a place he once called home and he remembers a time when he was a boy, when he met a girl and lost his heart. But it's better than that, and not quite like that at all. It was, as the best books are, full of more than you think will possibly fit in its pages. It was A Story, in the way Isak Dinesen might have meant -- bigger and more true than you'd imagined at the start. It was not unlike Lettie Hempstock's ocean, even knowing that it really was an ocean. 

And now I'm not sure what to say about it, though I felt, immediately, like I wanted to say something. Hm. That seems like a problem for a book review. So, here's what I think you need to know to understand what I thought of the book, which is really the point of a review: I mostly didn't think about it and I consider that a good thing...

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