Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - The Road

This was a #FOMO Lighthouse Library Bookclub read for June 2023, and I really had no idea what it was about. I was amused that I had already read "The Road" by Jack London which is also a really cool book, though published 99 years earlier.

My overall impression of this book was that it was like a zombie apocalypse story, minus the trees and the zombies. In a non-descript North America that has been razed by fire, a man and his boy walk south in the hopes that they will get to warmer weather, and find it easier to survive. The main characters are known simply as the man, and the boy. This sort of increases the feeling of the bleakness, because for the most part, people are few and far between, and so you don't need a whole heap of names to disambiguate people.. and those names you do get from people are arbitrary and fairly meaningless.

Obviously this is a story of survival, and the balance of grief, hope and faith. As they travel down a highway they have to overcome obstacles both physical and emotional. The narrative is a mix of procedural descriptions, and poetic prose. It almost feels like the pretty bits are mismatched to the story, but I figure you have to have some fancy bits for your essays about the Literature (crozzled means with dark crispy bits on the outside.. like bacon). Typically the poetic observations are those of the end of day; musings that find one just before sleep after a long day of slogging through the countryside. It might help to have a dictionary nearby, because you don't get a Pulitzer by only using common words. There is a harsh poetic beauty to describing a highway full of burnt out cars whose occupants were scorched inside as they tried to flee the firestorms.

Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

I really loved the descriptions of coming upon windfall resources, and in my own mind, I would have stopped my journey if I found plenty of resources.. or at least had a breather. Maybe I'm too risk averse to survive the holocaust of a continent. From what happens it doesn't look like radiation is a part of it, so this is a different take on things than other apocalyptic stories like Mad Max.

It was certainly an interesting read.

Content Warnings

___'s review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

I've been excited to read this book for nearly a decade. When I finally got around to it, I nearly DNFed it numerous times just in the first several pages due to the writing "style". I had to look up whether this was intentional for whatever reason or maybe I simply picked up a really badly edited knock off version of the book or something.

The lack of quotation marks, apostrophes, other miscellaneous punctuation, along with numerous made up compound words and, worst of all, the plethora of run-on sentences made this extremely difficult and annoying for me to read. Other reviewers acknowledged this annoyance as well but said it gets better and the reader becomes used to it.

I didn't.

Regardless, I finished the book. The story itself was fine. I'll include a small excerpt that's on the third page of the book which would prove to be a good example of the writing "style" of the rest of book. If you can handle an entire book full of sentences like these, maybe you'll enjoy this book more than I did:

He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep.

Content Warnings

avilareads's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

heartbreaking, with a running current of hopelessness. some of the most beautiful prose i have ever read. truly a masterclass on apocalyptic fiction.

i have some issues with the ending, i felt like it did not align with the themes and ideas that had been set up by the entire book. but honestly, aside from the last 5 pages, it was a perfect novel in every respect.

Content Warnings

elfsteel's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

Content Warnings

tr4shc4n's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

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