My Thoughts:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a dystopian adult novel about a father and his son who are in a post apocalyptic world where they are trying to survive, stay away from hordes of Zombie-like gangs and not die in the process. This novel was so difficult to get through and so disturbing that I talked my husband into reading the book with me. He tried and then refused to finish it. I was disturbed by the struggle. I almost with there were Zombies as they would be less scary than gangs of desperate and starving human beings. For my husband, he could not get over McCarthy's writing style. His big beef was on the author's use of 50 words in a sentence to say something that could be written much simpler with the same effect. It was just too wordy for him and this road was dragging on too long so he abandoned it. I slogged through because I needed to get to the end of the road, or death, or whatever came first, but I was not having fun slogging through. I also want to say that Cormac McCarthy died last summer (June 2023) at 89, so I am not trying to speak ill of this American author who has garnered multiple writing awards, however, his outlook on America and humanity is dark, dark, dark, so I am not saying anything new.
What I wanted to focus on is not the tone of his story, but on the issue my husband has, which is McCarthy's prose style which is just difficult to read. He does not write for the common man/woman. He does not have much wit to him. His vocabulary tends to be pedantic. So if you take away the prose and stick with the tone and premise of a father and son trying to get to the coast in a post apocalyptic world, as readers we are faced with a more familiar story of survival and the ability of the young son to keep his humanity while the father tries to protect him from seeing the horrors that will stick in his memory.
Manu Larcenet does a fabulous job of keeping the feeling of cold, hunger and sorrow within his illustrations. He does not need a lot of words to tell this story. However, the conversations that he does include in the book gives us just enough horror and hope. Job well done! The Road in this adaptation is just as haunting as the original, but I would use this adaptation over the original for a literature group choice if we are looking at dystopia or post apocalyptic pieces caused by climate change, natural disasters, or man made disasters.
Suggestions for Curriculum and Classroom Use:
Thematic Currents:
- Death in a Dying World
- Humanity and Ethics
- Philosophy of Survival
- Parent/Child or Father/Son relationships
- Survival
Activity:
- Literature workshop on dystopia - if you are not sure how to do a literature workshop in a secondary classroom, this blog post is not enough time to go over it. I would need a whole semester of an English methods course to even introduce it, however, Sheridan Blau has a great book called The Literature Workshop by Heinemann Publishers. Check that out and choose something to try. I trust this publisher as they print books by teacher practitioners rather than education scholars who have not set foot in a K-12 classroom in many years. Chapter 2 is about the power of rereading. Although they use a poem, imaging doing a rereading of some key scenes of this graphic novel so that students "read" the illustrations and sparse text to have students go through the process and also record their understanding as they reread
- Other books that can be paired with this graphic novel:
- Life as We Knew It series by Susan Beth Pfeffer
- Hiroshima by John Hersey
- Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakagawa (graphic by an atomic bomb survivor)
Publication Information:
Illustrator: Manu Larcenet
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts (September 17, 2024)
Hardcover: 160 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1419776779
Reading Age: 13 years and up
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