Title: The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Series: NA
Sexual Content: None
Objectional Content: Violence, descriptions of death, including children
Synopsis (from Goodreads) : A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
My Review of The Road
What did I just read? The Road has received so much praise and has won a Pulitzer and I just can’t imagine how. I won’t say that I out right hated this book, because I didn’t hate. Honestly, I don’t feel enough about it to even say dislike. However, I definitely didn’t like it. There was nothing to like or dislike because nothing happens! The entire book is a nameless man and son walking, starving, finding food, repeat. I felt nothing for these characters, no sympathy, no empathy, no concern. I was basically just waiting for them to die.
Now, despite all that, this book is extremely easy to read. For starters, it’s a fairly short book, and there are no chapters, which means there isn’t really a logical stopping point. Also, the writing is so…juvenile? If I didn’t know better I would have thought The Road was written by someone in their late teens and this was their first book. The writing would go something like this: “The man woke up and checked on the boy and then wrapped the blanket around him and then stirred the fire.” Just unnecessarily long run on sentences that barely describe anything. There was also no use of quotation marks for the dialogue, which was the worst dialogue I’ve ever read.
I will say that there is an atmosphere of mystery that initially drew me in. What happened to the world? How did these characters come to be in the situation their in? Well, that is left up to the reader’s imagination. There is description of trees and ground being ash and the snow being grey as it falls from the sky. I guess we’re just supposed to make something up in our own minds about what occurred.
So, my rating for The Road is 2 out of 5 stars and if I’m being completely honest, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone.
Sorry to those who truly love this book and think it’s a masterpiece. Maybe I’m just dumb and I don’t understand the subtle nuances or something.
Anyway…
Thanks for reading and I’d love to know what you thought as well!