hella good book review. POSSIBLY the best book review in the universe

Aya Nakano
Lowney Book Review
The Road

For this novel review, I read a novel written by Cormac McCarthy titled “The Road”. The book is about a duo of a father and son that have been traveling constantly for months now in a world where most of civilization and life is destroyed already from a disaster. The mother, you find out later in the novel, has committed suicide. They remain unnamed throughout the whole novel. It takes place in the United States. The whole world is covered in ash and the father and his son wear masks to clean out the air they breathe. The human life that is left is made up of a collection of cannibals and refugees who search for any type of food possible. Everything, such as forests, rivers, all types of nature, is bare and empty. It is winter time and they are trying to survive by reaching another region with warmer weather. The father in the novel is described as well traveled and educated. He realizes that the will not be able to survive in the winter so they set out and follow highways. This is I believe the title “The Road” comes from, from the two main characters following a road and we see the journey they take. On their trip, they face events that they must pass to save their own lives. It made the book more exciting and interesting because it was two characters attempting to survive in a world where the only living human beings were cannibals and marauders. The reader can see that there is something wrong with the father since throughout the whole book he is coughing up blood once in awhile. He is dying and it seems as if he cannot protect his son anymore from the struggles they go through. The two are without food, tired, and attacked by cannibals. They travel the roads carrying a gun with two bullets that are meant for suicide. The son is told to kill himself before he can be captured by the cannibals or marauders. The dad does not want the son to be captured and experience what cannibals do to their prey. The dad is also afraid that he himself might have to kill his son to save him from a more horrible death. The thought of killing his own son haunts him through the novel. The bond between father and son are extremely strong since they only have each other to depend on. The end of the novel is pretty depressing as the father dies from his sickness he had after they reached the south where there is warmer climate. He leaves his son on the road. But then the boy comes across a man who has been following them through their journey. We find out the man has a wife and two kids, and they decide to adopt the boy as their own. The boy ends up with a new family which shows him the love and care that his father did show when he was alive. I usually hate reading books for any class, but this book did not bother me as much as others. It was a pretty easy read, only being 256 pages. In the beginning I was pretty interested in the novel because they were going through the highways and they had to watch out for cannibals and marauders. It was a fight for survival for them. Then towards the end I found it really boring, disappointing and depressing. It was boring because they weren’t being attacked and it was just them traveling most of the time. This was also a reason why it was disappointing because I was expecting a major encounter with a group of cannibals or marauders. Then the obvious depressing part of the book for me was seeing the father fall to his sickness after all the struggles they went through and finally making it to their goal. It was sad to see their strong bond being broken by his sickness. The bond was something you can appreciate in the book and you can see how the father- son bond was so strong. It was them against the world pretty much. As a closing thought, I do recommend the book to readers but I advise them not to expect much.