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The Road by Cormac McCarthy

In this post-apocalyptic novel, a man and his young son are traveling across burned America in order to find the coast. What they will find there is uncertain. Their priority is to keep alive amid starvation, the "bad guys," cannibalism, freezing temperatures, sickness, waning hope and faith, and the temptation of suicide, symbolized by the ever-present pistol the man carries. Everything is reduced to its most basic form, including the dialogue between the two and the stylistic elements the author uses. Page after page they travel the road, with only eachother and the love they have for one another, and the "fire" they carry. The reader is kept interested by waiting to see if perhaps some Godly intervention will occur when they are finally able to get to the coast, but the anti-climactic event simply reinforces the wasteland that surrounds them.

At times touching, particularly the boy whose concern for goodness is heartwrenching, at other times harrowing, with its description of what people have been reduced to, the book overall was a typical dystopian novel: depressing. However, it does leave readers with a glimmer of hope in the form of the boy who must carry on, carry the fire, and fight to find a reason to continue amid a bleak and destroyed world.