I am a big book enthusiast. I read about a book a week and for that reason I get a lot of book recommendations from friends, this being one of them. I tend to stay in Christian fiction but I’ll veer into mainstream fiction every now and then.
I saw that the book was an Oprah book club book and that gave me some hope that perhaps it’d be good. I went into this with high expectations from the raving reviews and McCarthy’s remarkable “track record” as an author (though I’d not read any of his other books).
The book starts bleak, rock bottom if I could label it as anything, a man and a boy (or as we later find out, a man and his son). The narration of the book even from the start was confusing, third person to first person, from the father, to the boy. It seemed to be a million really small sentences put to together to make one page… .like a bunch of pictures, slightly related to each other trying to make a movie. But I stuck with it, sure that it would come around.
And it seemed to at times, something good would happen, and then something terrifying that canceled out the good, gloom gloom, a tiny bit of sunshine, oh and then more gloom than before. I could hear the monotone of the narration dripping from the text on the pages.
Yet I still read, hoping still that perhaps, just perhaps it would end well, it got worse and worse and oh worse still, with no ray of sunshine in view and then it ends. I don’t mean to ruin it for you but someone dies, you see it coming for chapters and then it happens, not even a sliver of hope that it wont. Then a few paragraphs more and it’s over.
Seems like McCarthy just got tired of writing it and decided to end it and just wrote what first came to mind as a way out. Reading this book was like looking at a really expensive confusing piece of art and trying to figure out why anyone in their right mind would pay more than 5$ for it. I don’ see the big hype, I was so happy to finish the gloom book and get onto something with a promising plot and a more even mix of ups and downs.
Some say that the world he paints is imaginative and brilliant but I find it to be quite depressing, just reminded me of being in the woods in a thunderstorm- but for a very long time. His characters were build upon the very worst of human nature, every evil ugly thing that is hidden inside was out in the open, not trust, no love, no hope anywhere in this book.
So- my review concludes with two thumbs down, would not recommend this book to ANYONE. Not sure what Oprah saw in it or if she was just challenged by the difficulty to get through it. I’ve had more stimulation to my mind while standing in line at the grocery store, or sitting and waiting at the dmv. Needless to say I won’t be adding McCormic to my fav authors list anytime soon.
