"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman

Encouraged by my last read - something current and contemporary as opposite to my usual unearthing of classics - I decided to check out the book that was constantly floating somewhere around me, in fact I start suspecting that the Universe nudges me towards this book because I was finding it again and again everywhere I looked. Not that I knew a thing about Neil Gaiman, honestly his is the name I was not familiar with. It all changed drastically now, because dear reader, for the first time in my life I finished the book and than re-read it again from beginning to the end.

Apparently it was meant to be a short story and it starts shaky - there are heaps of praises (so called "blurbs") on the book cover, but they all somehow pointed me in a completely wrong direction, promising some dark disturbing thriller and "long forgotten secrets from childhood". Honestly, either I watched too many crime TV serials or this advertisements got me confused, either way it was absolutely not what I expected. There is a relatively slow initial chapter dealing with somebody thinking about past but the real start of the book is on the page 9 as the new chapter starts and the main protagonist recalls ... "Nobody came to my seventh birthday party." From here onwards, we follow this little, lonely unnamed boy who loves nothing better than his world of books and sees the big world differently than grown ups and this is part of magic in Gaiman's writing: he somehow recalls that children have their own way of seeing things, something we tend to forget as we grow up. Whatever happens later (and a lot happens in this magnificent and short book) little boy explains it in his head the way only children would do. When he meets a 11 year old girl from a neighbourhood farm and she is clever way above her age, he asks he how long was she eleven. This was (for example) just one of hundreds of little touches trough this magic book and truly it is a wonder, what a discovery, it turned out to be one of those brilliant small masterpieces that in my heart leave far more excitement than anything super-hyped and massive. At certain point the book becomes absolutely gripping fantasy with supernatural beings all over the place (including the neighbours!) but in the centre is still a little boy and his understanding of the life around him. What a beauty, what a thrill, what a discovery.