The Road

3/5.

The novel was okay, not bad and not good. Just okay. The premise, of a boy and a father traveling through an apocalyptic setting, is intriguing and awesome, but I don't think that it was executed well.

My biggest complaint is with the writing style: it's quite dry, blunt and quick. There is rarely any intriguing description for me to highlight because I want to remember it or go back to it. I highlighted maybe 100 things, which isn't a lot for me, since when I read 1984 by George Orwell, I highlighted somewhere around 1100 lines/paragraphs.

Some sentences felt grammatically wrong, or just odd, so I asked my friend, who has superb knowledge of English, about it. She said that they are correct, and that the writer is writing that way on purpose- I believe her, but it still feels odd to me. Perhaps I'm just unfamiliar with that kind of writing, which is definitely likely. Another thing that also felt odd was the fact that the author didn't use any quotation marks when the boy and his father were speaking. I'll leave three examples of odd writing down below.

-“They were a long time finding the cart.”

-“They were partly screened by the ruins of the privet but he knew they had minutes at most and maybe no minutes at all.”

-“Lastly he made a bindle in a plastic tarp of some cans of juice and cans of fruit and of vegetables and tied it with a cord and then he stripped out of his clothes and piled them among the goods he’d collected and went up onto the deck naked and slid down to the railing with the tarp and swung over the side and dropped into the gray and freezing sea.”

My second complaint is just being slightly annoyed with the decisions that the father makes. The recurring theme is that the father and the boy get extremely close to dying from starvation over and over again, but at the last moment they find food. Then they proceed to eat excessively every day- an appetizer, main meal, and dessert.(I feel like it would be a logical decision to have minimal meals every other day when you have a limited amount of food?) And then the process starts repeating. After some time, they began starving again. Another decision that baffled me is that the father throws away some cans that look "rusted" or "bad"?? You have a limited supply of food, and you're throwing it away based on what appears to be an arbitrary metric? It comes off as arbitrary, since we, the readers, aren't explained his criteria for what makes food "bad". Besides, you're in the post-apocalyptic world and you are being picky about food?

I'm just going to leave it right there. Overall, the book is fine, it might grow on me, but as of now, I probably won't read it again in the future. I'm not sure why it's so highly rated.

Отличная книга, в которой все страшно, но при этом нет никаких типично ужасных моментов. Очень сильно интересно.