jklugman 's review for:

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

2.0

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The follow-up to "All the Pretty Horses" has similar characters (laconic American men coming up from hard poverty who are semi-cosmopolitan in their interactions with Mexicans), takes place in the same milieu (Southwest America and northern Mexico, in the 1940s), and is written in a similar sparse style. The narrative in this book is much harder to follow, as Billy Parham's motives for traversing Mexico become more and more opaque, whereas John Grady Cole's journey was relatively more straight-forward. The amount of animal cruelty in the novel was hard to take, although that's not meant as a critique.