Ocean at the End of the Lane and Frozen in Time

November and December seemed to fly by, and I realized that I did not post my book reviews for those months!  I have decided to copy and paste them into this post, and I will continue with a new review in February.  Enjoy!

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I should say up front that I LOVE Neil Gaiman.  To me he is a master storyteller.  There are not many authors that can write for children (Chu's Day a picture book, and he is a Newberry award winner for The Graveyard Book), and adults (Anansi Boys).  The Ocean at the End of the Lane continues his legacy of great writing.  It is part fairy tale, part fantasy, part mystery, and all entertaining.  Neil Gaiman's work always contains an element of "creepy" and there are several places where you will find your skin crawl a little, but the storytelling is nothing short of amazing.  Enjoy this wonderful little novel.
From the Publisher:
A major new work from "a writer to make readers rejoice" (Minneapolis Star Tribune)—a moving story of memory, magic, and survival
Sussex, England. 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, 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.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.
A groundbreaking work from a master, 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. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

Frozen in time: an epic story of survival and a modern quest for lost heroes of World War II
I read a lot of nonfiction.  I find it interesting, but not often as "gripping" as fiction work.  This is an exception to that.  This book I would consider to be a masterful work of narrative nonfiction.  If you are a history buff, and love a great adventure story, this is the book for you.  I had never heard of these plane crashes until I read this book, and I had a great time looking up more information about it as I went along.  Mitchell Zuckoff also wrote Lost in Shangra-La and I am hoping we will hear more World War II stories from him soon!

From the Publisher:
On November 5, 1942, a U.S. cargo plane on a routine flight slammed into the Greenland ice cap. Four days later, a B-17 on the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on the B-17 survived. The U.S. military launched a second daring rescue operation, but the Grumman Duck amphibious plane sent to find the men flew into a severe storm and vanished.
In this thrilling adventure, Mitchell Zuckoff offers a spellbinding account of these harrowing disasters and the fate of the survivors and their would-be saviors. Frozen in Time places us at the center of a group of valiant airmen fighting to stay alive through 148 days of a brutal Arctic winter by sheltering from subzero temperatures and vicious blizzards in the tail section of the broken B-17 until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen attempts to bring them to safety.
But that is only part of the story that unfolds in Frozen in Time. In present-day Greenland, Zuckoff joins the U.S. Coast Guard and North South Polar—a company led by the indefatigable dreamer Lou Sapienza, who worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck's last flight—on a dangerous expedition to recover the remains of the lost plane's crew.
Drawing on intensive research and Zuckoff 's firsthand account of the dramatic 2012 expedition, Frozen in Time is a breathtaking blend of mystery, adventure, heroism, and survival. It is also a poignant reminder of the sacrifices of our military personnel and their families—and a tribute to the important, perilous, and often-overlooked work of the U.S. Coast Guard.