I picked up this book because it had so many literary accolades, and because I am an absolute sucker for post-apocalyptic stories.

I had a hard time with the first ten pages. Cormac’s writing style can be hard to get past; it feels like something that should have received a C- in a high school creative writing class. The book is written in choppy, stream-of-consciousness sentences that are often fragments or run-ons, and the author gleefully omits punctuation and jams words together in a way that makes you sure he’s trying to increase your sense of unease just by making the words look wrong on the page. 

But then I got sucked in. The storyline is very simple, so simple that I didn’t believe it when I read it on the back cover. It is the story of a man and his son–both unnamed–walking through a barren, desolate, and cold America, just trying to stay alive and reach their destination. The terrors they encounter along the way are nightmarishly surreal–bands of starving people, unrelenting cold, forests of trees just falling down. The constant danger left me jittery and completely unable to put the book down; I finished it in a couple of nights.

The professional literary types say that this book is about hope, and three-quarters of the way through the book you’ll be wondering if there’s a shred of it anywhere in the bleak text. But there is: the father and his son exemplify a kind of transcendental hope that is completely separated from reason and circumstance. You could say that it’s hope in its most pure form or hope in its most foolish form, but it’s unquestionably hope, and an examination of what it means when it is, literally, all you’ve got.

There’s also a good dose of morality here, not in the preachy sense, but in the sense that makes you feel a little twinge in your gut at some of the hard choices faced by the protagonists. The right thing to do isn’t always obvious, and sometimes they don’t do it.

In the end I liked this book, but I can’t recommend it to you unless you have a high tolerance for sorrow, horribly disturbing images, and selfless love.