The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

From the paperback:
   A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse where she once lived, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
   A groundbreaking work as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out.

   Neil Gaiman has done it again! Captured my attention with a book I didn't want to put down. He writes so beautifully. He weaves a world where names hold power (we never learn the narrator's name) and some things just can't be explained or understood.
   The narrator is a child who has no friends. He escapes in books and stories as much has he can. He meets the Hempstock women after a startling discovery and his world continues to be rocked for the next few days. The Hempstocks aren't witches per-say, they're something else, something more. Something (Old Mrs. Hempstock calls it a "flea") hitches a ride back inside our hero and after he tries to remove it without knowing the full extent of what he does, a new nanny comes to care for him and his sister. Ursula Monkton, who everyone, but our hero, loves. He knows that the Hempstock women can help him get rid of her, if only he can get away.
   If it sounds like a lot of "somethings" are in my description of this book, it's because most of it can only be understood by reading the book. The beings described in The Ocean at the End of the Lane could be monsters but it depends on your definition of the word.
    This is a fantastic book for readers of all ages. I'd recommend it to anyone who has a love of fantasy. Or anyone who just loves to read. The narrator is easy to care for and identify with for lovers of the written word,