Avoiding a post-funeral reception at his sister's house, a man returns to the home of his childhood friend Lettie Hempstock. Lettie's gone, of course, and the old woman here must be her mother, not her grandmother, but as the man sits by the pond he remembers so much of when he was seven years old: the opal miner, the nanny, the worm in his foot that wasn't a worm but a door from another world through which a monster comes. He remembers Lettie Hempstock, her mother, her grandmother. But memory is a tricky thing, the way it slides out of our minds and is replaced with other memories, equally true and more easily understood but inaccurate to what really happened. 
 I loved the story and the telling of it, though the book doesn't resonate with me the way it does many readers, and for that I'm slightly disappointed. There's a pleasant melancholy over the novel, a sort of nostalgia for the magic of childhood that would make the memories real while the adult brain knows that those things could not have truly happened. 
 I can see this on an upper high school reading list, but I'm not 100% sure 16/17/18-year-olds will appreciate it as much as adults, not having the distance from childhood that adults do.