"Okay. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Okayokayokayokayokay okay okay." The most frequent line of dialogue spoken in The Road, the boy or man telling the other "okay" is coincidentally exactly how I would describe this book. It was okay.

The dialogue overall was very laconic, which frequently can be done quite well. Though the repetition of identical exchanges between the two main characters proved to be rather boring. Constantly saying they need to hide, that they need to make a fire, constantly saying they were scared or cold, constantly saying "okay". When you are trying to survive in a barren post-apocalyptic world these are things that you of course are forever dealing with on a daily basis, but all the same hearing the same thing over and over again gets dull quickly. I just wish that upon describing the process of building a fire on the seventh or eighth iteration McCarthy could have found it finally enough, but he just kept describing that same process over and over again.

What I found that was done considerably well was McCarthy's ability to immerse you fully in the world he built for The Road. How the setting was described as well as the overall tone made it very easy to project yourself into what this post-apocalyptic scenario looked and felt like. Given that none of us live in such a world we of course cannot know for sure if it will be like he describes, but all the same after reading this it feels like the most accurate scenario.

If they let you do halves, this would ultimately be a two and a half star book. It wasn't overly bad, though it wasn't overly good either. It was okay.