Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.
Imagine you are a sixteen-year-old boy adrift in the Southwest of a Steinbeck novel—where horse smarts, in both senses of the word, are your only tool of survival. Kicking around with your best bud on your first grand adventure, you meet another kid something like you, but he ain’t quite right in the head maybe. Still, you do the Christian thing to help him along. You find your dream job and dream girl, and then that association comes back to kick your butt like a wild stallion. Think True Grit meets Romeo and Juliet with a slug of Bad Boys.
If you appreciate a good old-fashioned Western with heroes, villains, impossible love, bronco busting, and brawls, this coming-of-age epic is for you. Be warned, however, that McCarthy incorporates Spanish into much of the dialogue without translating, for which he received substantial criticism, but he offers enough clues to the meaning that an astute reader should be able to figure out what’s going on.
Winner of the National Book Award for 1992, this is the first in a series, the Borderland Trilogy, which I can’t wait to finish. It was also made into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon, Penelope Cruz, and the trailer appears to be true to the author’s intent. The hardback is 301 pages, but I listened to the audio (10 hours), masterfully narrated by Frank Muller.