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Book Review of The Road

The Road
The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Genres: Literature & Fiction, Reference
Book Type: Paperback
annapi avatar reviewed on + 334 more book reviews


Another 2.5 book - and I can't decide if it's to be rounded up or down. I didn't like it, but I didn't dislike it either. A father travels with his son down the road in a post-apocalyptic world. More a portrait than a story, this paints a picture of a bleak world where life is all but obliterated after some unnamed cataclysmic event. I can see why it won the acclaim it did, but it's just not my type of book. More than the deliberate lack of punctuation, what really irritated me most was the prevalence of sentence fragments. I understand it's for the effect, but it took me several tries through months to pick it back up after I pretty much flung it down in disgust after reading a couple of pages the first time I opened it. I've read dystopia before so the depressing theme did not bother me, but the lack of a real story did. (Yes, I understand it's about the characters and their relationship, not what happens to them.) It did manage to catch my interest at last more than halfway through the book when a few things actually started to happen to the father and boy, but I found the end flat and disappointing after half-expecting some "Of Mice & Men" type of climax. While I'm glad I managed to get through it, I can't really recommend it except for an experience. Great book to read for an English paper, but not for pleasure.