The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Overall: 2/5
Plot and themes: 2/5
Characters: 1/5
Writing style: 2/5
Attention-grabbing: 1/5
The Road is the story of a man and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. It's completely without quotations or anything unnecessarily complicated like giving the characters names. It reads very much like a novella but it's a full-length novel that makes really no commitment to advancing the world-building or the arcs of the individual characters.
I'm very focused on character growth so it's obvious that I could have some problems reading a book like this. I understand leaving out elements of the story to allude to the simplicity of life without structure, the directness of surviving rather than living. Honestly though, it just felt lazy to me. It felt like this was kind of an introduction to a bigger problem but there's nothing else, this exists for no reason other than to say that life is meaningless and that books don't really need to advance to anything.
And maybe I could have respected that if it wasn't so long. It was repetitive, we were being told that we should be afraid of these cannibals and strangers only for the resolution to be completely unrelated to it. I don't think it was particularly well-written, maybe if I had read it prior to the circa 2012 dystopian era where stuff like this was completely overdone it would have read better. But really, it just felt like someone who doesn't know how to write trying to pretend that they do by throwing something half-ass at us. If the story itself had been somewhat entertaining while still conveying the whole life is meaningless thing maybe I would've liked it more but no, it just felt all together lacking.
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