Subscribe
This is set in the future and is a post-apocalyptic tale. Everything has been burned and all that is left is ruins and ash. The sky is gray all of the time with ash and when there are rainstorms, even that doesn’t clear away the permanent gray ash. Not just a portion of the country is destroyed, but apparently everything all over the world. There is very little left to eat and some people (among the very few survivors left remaining) have turned cannibalistic. The book’s heros, a man and his son, are the good guys and either go starving or luck out and find left behind canned goods. They start out in Minnesota at the beginning of the book and head Southwest ending up at the beach by the end of the book. There is no mention of any character names in the book.
The father is a good protector of his son. They push a small cart (I believe it was a grocery cart) with them on their travels which is filled with all the possessions they could take with them or find on their journey. The father has a pistol with only two bullets left. When he fires one, he has to whittle more out of wood and pray that he doesn’t have to use it. The father also develops a pretty bad cough (maybe Tuberculosis?) and has to be careful when they are hiding to restrain it. The son is a very interesting character. I imagine he is about 9 or 10 maybe a little older. He is very compassionate and wants to help the people he meets on the journey. His father is a little more realistic and more intent on survival and knows that they have to look out for themselves first. When the father mentions that they can’t help these people the boy sulks a bit until the father explains how dire their situation is.
They are also very lucky. They manage to find food stores or at least take blankets and extra clothing from the deserted homes they come across. They also manage to avoid the bad guys. There is one particularly gruesome scene at a farmhouse where father and son come across a group of people hiding in a store closet, with limbs missing and finding human bones on the cooking stove. This is one of those situations where the boy wants to help, but the father knows they need to get what they can and get out of there. There is another horribly gruesome thing they witnessed later on at an abandoned campsite blackened on the spit.
Here is an example of the writing and a very deep conversation the boy and their father have near the end of the book. A bedraggled man steals their cart, the father and son catch up to him. The father wants to shoot the man and the boy begs him not to. “He is just hungry,” the boy says. The father finally relents, they take the cart back and they leave the man standing there naked. Here is the conversation after that:
“He was just hungry, Papa. He’s going to die.
He’s going to die anyway.
He’s so scared, Papa
The man squatted and looked at him. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared.
The boy didn’t answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.
You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him.
What? he said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.”
That is a really deep thing for the boy to say. He is the one with the weight on his shoulders, the one who worries about everyone and everything. All I could say after reading that was, “Wow!”
The writing is very well done in this book and I found myself going to the dictionary a lot. Not a lot happens, plot-wise, but it was still an interesting and captivating read. I never found myself bored with it.
Leave a comment
The book sounds interesting, and I have had people recommend the book to me. I tend to like reading the “end of the world” type stories, for whatever reason. I’m not sure if the writing style is going to be difficult for me or not, but, I think I want to give this one a try anyway.
Comment by Jen 11.14.09 @ 6:30 pm[...] Book Sandwich Review of the The Road Contact: 1-888-246-2425 Rental Reviews Promos nlott29@gmail.com Twitter.com AudioPlayer.embed("pod_audio_1", {soundFile: "http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lottsthoughts.com%2Frr%2Fpodcast%2Frr137.mp3"}); Click to Download Book to Movie, drama, Post-Apocalypse, Road, Thriller Leave a comment Trackback [...]
Pingback by RR137: The Road - Rental Reviews 12.05.09 @ 4:34 pmLeave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>