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the oceans at the end of the lane

The Oceans at the end of the lane
This took me a really long time to finish, BUT I MADE IT!
I personally love the overlapping of magical realism and contemporary fantasy. I’m less knowledgeable of Anglo-Saxon literature, than I am of Latin American, Spanish and European works. At my school we would read a lot of magical realis, works like 100 years of solitude and Isabel Allende. This book is kind of a mixture of magical realism and the classic fairy tales. The story is set in a more “believable setting”. Unusual things are happening to seemingly normal people. It’s when he meets Lettie that things start getting weird. The classic fairy tale elements are the different creatures like the fleas and varmints. The real part is the disconnect the protagonist has between his childhood and adulthood. It is suggested that his heart was eaten by the hunger birds, and its slowly growing back. This symbolizes the loss of purity and innocence when leaving childhood.
Although The oceans at the end of the lane is considerably more lighthearted than the previous two authors I mentioned before. Memories are very ambiguous, we have to remember that the narrator is pulling stuff from his head, we don’t really know what truly happened.
 The Hempstocks are very interesting, they see  things differently and make everything else seem disappointing and gloomy, this ties along with the previous themes of memory. They also reveals to the main character that this is not his first time going there and Lettie still checks up on him. 

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