What readers think of The Road, plus links to write your own review.

With a touching story of a father and son struggling to remain whole in a broken world, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road displays an excellent assembly of powerful imagery and a classic flickering hope for a brighter future. While this experimental, post-apocalyptic novel describes a dark Earth and its merciless inhabitants, McCarthy puts an intense emphasis on what little hope the world continues to possess in the form of a boy, born after the end of civilized society, who “carries the fire” and inspires others to do the same.

Faced with vicious cannibals, ruthless thieves, and the occasional straggler not so different from themselves, the father and son journey south along “The Road” in hopes to reach a warmer climate before the cold and deadly winter sweeps over them. Food is scarce, shelter is rare, and potential dangers lurk around every corner. Although suicide is a tempting option, they continue through the ash and snow to survive, refusing to surrender although the world has already abandoned them. Any science fiction reader with an interest in opening basement doors to find a pantry of food in the form of still-breathing human beings and a preference for a bittersweet ending will definitely possess a fondness for this novel.

While particularly exploring the collapse of society and the breakdown of social standards, the main description of the story is spun in an intricate web of sentence fragments depicting mostly the landscape and the psychological stresses on the main characters’ minds; although do not confuse McCarthy’s lack of proper sentence structure and his frequently confusing refusal to include quotation marks and other indications of “who-spoke-when’s” with a case of ignoring the accepted grammatical rules for the simple reason of “I just can.” Bold experimentation with style and form of writing is one of the many Modern characteristics that The Road possesses, a poetic quality few can achieve with such finesse and elegance as McCarthy. The novel remains something of an “easy read,” written in a straightforward fashion, a relief from the numerous novels that are frequently undermined by their over stylized and flowery descriptions.

The Road definitely goes on the top shelf of my bookcase with the rest of my favorites. It’s heart-wrenching, curious, and invigorating – leaving the interpretation for what ended the modern world completely up to my own bit of imagination, a trait I can easily admire. McCarthy’s granted the rare coupling of wanting more while at the same time feeling completely satisfied with its ending. A perfect candidate for a rainy day, once you start down The Road, there’s no turning back.

The one time I went camping, it was only for one night, and we had plenty of supplies. The book The Road throws you right into a world of darkness and devastation where every minute you have to struggle to live. Cormac McCarthy uses extreme description to make you feel as if you are in a post apocalyptic world. The openness and loose ends make it all the more real. Not only was it an interesting journey through a scorched landscape it was a very easy book to read.



The book follows a father and his son through some of the harshest conditions imaginable. You can feel yourself take their place from having a vivid picture of what is going on around the two people implanted into your head. They passed a metal trash dump where someone had once tried to burn bodies. The charred meat and bones under the damp ash might have been anonymous save for the skulls. No longer any smell. The description of every situation makes it impossible not to picture what is going on to the father and the son. Almost all of the lines in this masterpiece are perfectly composed to give you something for every sense. The most interesting thing about The Road is the way it is written. This is my favorite part about it. The openness that this book has lets you plug in whatever you so choose to. The only things it gives you to link to what happened before the book is all of the flashbacks. They are littered throughout the book. Not once in those flashbacks however does it mention anything about the father or boy from before the beginning of the book. Cormac McCarthy didn't even name anyone. Not one sentence gives any insight to what happened to the world. McCarthy left all this open for you to interpret it for yourself. Put in whatever you want and you get your own version of the story.



Reading The Road was extremely easy. This is a really good thing about this book. The print is big and paragraphs are spread out a lot. Pages fly by very quickly. The language is really easy to understand too. Each page and each paragraph and each word flows perfectly together and makes it almost impossible to put the book down for an extended period of time. The lack of chapters also makes it so that you can't stop reading because you can't just read to the next chapter. The only hard thing is that conversations are confusing to follow because there are no names and it doesn't say who is talking.



The only way to understand why this future classic is going to be considered a classic sometime in the future and why it won the Pulitzer Prize you have to read it. Go get this book and enjoy this journey of father and son and see how they go through ups and downs and love and hate they can strive and keep pushing through a world that has been completely burnt to a crisp.

It's the end of the world as we know it, in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. McCarthy gives you the ability to make the book your own in his writings. He also gives a strong loving bond between the father and the son. McCarthy does all this while keeping this book a fairly simple read. This book could easily be a classic one day; it is that amazing.



The Road is a quest/survival book. It is about the journey of a father and a son to the south to escape the winter and hopes of survival in the post-apocalyptic world. Along the way, the bond of love between to the two is put to the test in this harsh, cold world that they are forced to survive in. The Road that they travel is symbolic and literal at the exact same time. The Road they travel on is symbolic for a journey of the growing of the child to be an adult and the father's road to the end of his life slowly day by day. The Road is literal because they are traveling on the road to escape the winter in the south.



This is one of the greatest books I have read in a long time. Personally, I think it has the qualities to one day become a classic book. The book could be one day considered a classic because of many reasons. McCarthy's unique style of writing, and his ability to let you fill the roles of the characters, and making the characters personal to you as the reader. And, McCarthy's descriptions of the areas and scenes depicted in the book the road, which are very vivid, dark, and desolate. And, McCarthy's ending also adds to the quality of the book because it is something you will never expect and may think about for a while. The Road shows many themes but two follow through-out the entire book. No matter where the boy and his father go, death is always close and creeping closer and closer to them as the winter approaches them. Nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. (pg.173) Darkness is another reoccurring theme. The dark is like a barrier to the boy and his father always consuming them. The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.(pg.15) Nights beyond darkness.



The Road is a fairly simple book to read. McCarthys writing paints a very good picture of this dying world. The dialogue can be tough to figure out at times because no names are given and no quote marks are used. So you have to pay very good attention when the characters are talking. So, times you may have to go back and reread, but its worth it. And, McCarthy often throws in a trouble word, but this makes the book all the more fun to read and helps give a feeling for what he is talking about.Love is an amazing thing. It can create such a strong bond especially between a father and a son that one would go through all odds to see the other survive. The Road's basis is the love for the son from the father and his will to survive. Once you pick up this book you wont want to put it down till you're done.

This is a compelling novel - hardly surprising given its prize winning status. It is both bleak (VERY bleak) and beautiful, the story of the love between a father and son who are on a journey of survival (the Road of the title) in a post apocalyptic world. We are left to draw our own conclusions about the cause of the apocalypse, this is an existential piece in which cause and history is irrelevant, nothing that was, is any longer, other than the few survivors - and they are not what they once were. The father and son, however, hold onto a remnant of hope - "the fire". Through his profound talent with words, McCarthy takes us on the journey with the two protagonists,in language that like the landscape,is sparse but overwhelming in its descriptive power. It is ultimately a triumph of the power of a father's love and a little boy's trust that somewhere, in some of the few of the world's survivors, there is still good to be found in the prevailing horror and evil that is the struggle to survive. Or indeed, is the triumph that humanity itself survives in a world that is post civilization as we know it? A book of many layers. More than, "Very Good", this book is a masterpiece.

This was a very powerful story. I think that McCarthy gets a bit edgier with every story that he writes.

A face-to-face group I belong to read this, the group is all women. I think I was the only one who really, really liked it.

The road, by cormac mcarthy in my opinion is one of the greatest books ever written. Although its ending is a little offset and crappy it is to be expected when reading the book and noticing all the hints that the author throws out to you.

Cormac McCarthy’s book, “The Road”, is a mystery/horror. The setting was a post apocalyptic, burned to ashes world where billions have been either burned or murdered and a select few left to eat or be eaten. A father and a son are part of the few left on the earth and they are on a journey to the coast for a chance of better survival.

I believe that the book’s tone and setting all helped create the overall feeling that Cormac Mcarthy was shooting for. He got his point across with his bloody imagery and his grotesque way of putting things. “What is it? He said. What is it? The boy shook his head. O papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.”(page 167).

There are two main characters in this book. One is the father, stress ridden and worried about his child’s survival. And then there is the son, a young boy with a lot on his chest and a sick father to care for. Both of which I feel are honorable. I feel that I mostly connected with the father character in a sense. The boy is not careless and is intelligent and I admire that.

I liked the book all the way up until the ending. The writing style was like nothing I had ever seen before, kind of like poetry, it flowed and went well together. Not having chapters was a good way to keep the reader, me, flipping pages. The voice was third person and was like someone telling a story of a father and a son.

Cormac Mcarthy is a great writer and I hope he will continue to make books.

Trying to imagine a post-apocalyptic world where the only survivors left are bands of cannibals, their captives, and a few stragglers fighting for survival is not something that one can easily ask the imagination to partake in. Somehow though, Cormac McCarthy is able to lure you into his horrific nightmare in his novel The Road.

The book takes place quite some time after an unexplained catastrophe has wiped out most of the human race and America has become an ash-covered and barren landscape. Although it is not specifically said there are many hints throughout the book that suggests that this destruction is worldwide.

What really enticed me was the relationship between the father and his son and McCarthy tried very hard to emphasize this to the reader. With nothing left in this charred world but each other the two lean on one another as their fight for survival never ceases. They are each other’s conscience during this time and their love and compassion for each other is what makes this book so tantalizing. The father is the well traveled one who has seen the good and bad of mankind and acts as the voice of reason. The boy is the compassionate one who does not let his own needs get in the way of those who he wants to help. I must admit that I have never read a book that kept me on the edge like this book did and I could never put the book down, no matter how hard I tried.
   
The title comes from that of the road that they are journeying on. However, I believe that the title also refers to life’s journey across a road with many twists and turns and no one ever knows what is coming around that next corner.

When reading this book I noticed that there are many reoccurring events that unfold. This is not an action packed book where gunfire is an often occurrence, but rather it is a book about a constant fight of survival where one’s intuition and intellect are often their greatest allies. The man and the boy are continually battling the harsh weather conditions, starvation, and trying to avoid the cannibals that stalk the land. They are traveling towards the coast in the hopes of finding friendlier climate conditions, some sort of civilization, and maybe just maybe their salvation.
   
Another battle that transpires in McCarthy’s book is the battle that mankind has been fighting since the beginning and that is the battle of good vs. evil. In the book the man constantly reminds the boy that they are the “good guys” and the people that try to kill them and eat other people are the “bad guys.” In the end it seems that there can be no victor as the world that they used to know crumbles around them.

Although I struggled with it at first I grew to love McCarthy’s writing style. I love how he lets your imagination run free and explore its own possibilities. He allows the reader to create his own image of the world and what it has been reduced to and he forces you to wonder what sort of event could have occurred that left the world in such a mess.

There are a few quotes that really speak volumes to what the book is about. The father’s best advice to his son is “you must carry the fire.” He tells his son that this fire is inside him and it is my belief that the man is referring to the boy and his will to live. He must remain motivated in order to survive and that as long as he keeps that fire inside of him he cannot succumb to the darkness that the rest of mankind has fallen to.

McCarthy grew up during the Cold War and it is my feeling that the war was incorporated into his book. Everyone’s worst fear during the time was that nuclear warfare would destroy the world and mankind itself would cease to exist. It was definitely evident in the book. Although it is never said what catastrophe led to the annihilation of all life on earth it is my belief that it was a manmade disaster, possibly a nuclear war.

McCarthy’s message in this book is blurry at first but eventually it becomes very evident and the reader will definitely get something out of it. This book is a must for all readers who cherish the constant fight against evil and against one’s self.

What if you were following a road, not knowing what you’d find, where you were going, or who you might meet? The earth as you once knew it has changed. It is cold, lifeless, and the sun shines no more. Everything is covered by the thick ash that remains after a sudden cataclysm which forever changes the lives of a father and his son.

Perhaps a world such as this is hard to imagine, but not when you begin to read novelist Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning fiction novel The Road. His writing allows you to taste the dryness and feel the pang of hunger. It is filled with detail and flows like poetry. This is why it is so suspenseful and frightening. You can picture the post-apocalyptic world as if you were watching a film or even experiencing it first hand.

In fact, that’s just how The Road came about. McCarthy had a vision while visiting El Paso, Texas with his young son. He imagined the city in the future and pictured “fires on the hill” all the while thinking about his son, John Francis McCarthy, whom the novel is dedicated to.

What’s interesting about the story is that there are basically two characters. These characters are referred to as “the man” and “the boy.” I think that by choosing to leave them nameless helps you, the reader, connect with them more. They do not have names, but what matters most is that they have each other.

The father and son are on a journey across hell on earth with nothing but the clothes on their back, some canned food, and a pistol with just two bullets left. The only thing they can do is keep moving with the uncertainty if reaching their destination will mean safety or death.

Along the way they experience some ungodly encounters and horrific sights. Meanwhile the pair always remained “the good guys” when other survivors resorted to enslaving, stealing, murder, and cannibalism.

The man tries to protect his son with all of his being, but realizes he can’t shield him from seeing such traumatizing events. All he cares about is keeping him safe and alive any way he can. What father wouldn’t? At one point in the story he tells his son that “if you died, I would want to die too.” There is no greater love than a parent for their child.

The boy is forced to grow up and become wise upon his years. His childhood had been stripped from him and the father does what he can to try to bring a smile to his face. The boy is also always ready to help people they come across while journeying along the road. He is very caring and compassionate towards people in need and totally disregards that he himself is in need too. This really leads to some “awe” moments. Especially when he tells his dad “you drink some first papa, you eat” when they are both starving and sickly.

I feel that men and women alike will enjoy this book. Its different then any book I’ve ever read and I enjoyed the change. The story keeps you at the edge of your seat and it’s almost unbearable. Yet somehow McCarthy keeps you hopeful and even inspires you to have courage and keep hold of faith.

Ultimately, The Road tells an unforgettable tale of a father and son desperately struggling for survival. You’ll find yourself turning page after page because you just have to know that they’ll be alright. You’ll question the motives of others, but never doubt the love and courage of “the good guys” who will always “carry the fire.”