How is Neil Gaiman so good?! I immediately wanted to read this dark (quite scary at times) little book again to figure some things out. I definitely don't think it's as simple as it seems. (view spoiler)[While many authors use fairy tales to explore childhood's loss of innocence, less often do you see the loss of memory come into play as deftly as it does here. How much memory loss was the boy's and how much was orchestrated by the Hempstocks? Why was he so aggravatingly mundane after such an incredible formative experience? This wasn't a Chosen One story or a quest story, and his run-in with the monster and even with Lettie didn't change him; he even said so. So...what was the point? 
 The NPR review touched on this as well: 
 "But this mystery, though frustrating, is also the source of this book's bittersweet emotional power. Now in his middle age, the protagonist has to ask himself whether his simple, mortal life justified a magical showdown. Like all the fantastical ideas in Ocean, this one has a real-world analogue. None of us ever really knows whether the people we become as adults are worth the love and protection given to us when we were too young to repay it in kind. And we have to grow old and die without ever knowing the answer." (hide spoiler)] 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were." 
 "Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters. And as for grown-ups..." She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, "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 always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." 
 "I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations." 
 "Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting." 
 "The coal shed smelled of damp and blackness and of old, crushed forests." 
 "Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them." 
 "Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans."