The book is about a little boy and his father. The world has been destroyed by some kind of natural disaster. The world is grey and there are no living things besides a small amount of humans. I would imagine the boy to be 12 or 13 of age and the father maybe 40. They lived in a small house for a couple of years during the catastrophe but left there when the mother committed suicide. She was tired of not having any food or water and the constant fear that someone would eat them. So the boy and his father went out on the road with just a shopping cart with some blankets and some cans of water.
They are walking from Northern America to the south in the winter looking for warmer weather.
On their travels they sleep outside and they have thin clothes and no food or water. Most of the other people they meet are cannibals and would like to eat them. They walk through deserted cities and are scared for their lives all the time. They also carry a gun with 2 bullets in, one for them each. But they have to kill a bad guy in the middle of the book so they just have one for the boy so he wouldn´t get eaten alive. So as soon as they are in danger of their lives the man puts the gun to the boy's head, ready to fire. The father dies in the end and the boy meets a family which had followed them the whole time and he accompanies them instead.
One event in the book that I thought was kind of good and well described was when they walked into a house which they thought was deserted. They found a hatch in the floor and under there was a dungeon completely dark and filled with people that hardly were able to walk, just laid down eating of each other´s legs and arms. So they had to run up from the dungeon and when they got up they hear the cannibals coming and run upstairs in the bathroom. They hide there with the gun pointing to the boy's head all the time. The prisoners start to bang at the hatch so the cannibals ran in to see what was going on and then the boy and his father could sneak out and hide in the forest. They slept only a couple of meters from the house and had to sleep there for two days before the cannibals stopped looking for them. The boy slept with the gun pointed to his head the whole time. Then they just moved on and the book continued with a lot more walking.
So basically the book is about them walking, looking for food and shelter and hiding from” the bad guys”. It gets boring to read about after a while and they have no good conversations. I have memorized one which appeared more times than I could count.
Starting like this: Are they going to kill us? Yes, but I won´t let them.
I´m scared, Papa. So am I. Are we going to die? Yes, everyone is but not now.
Put in optional nonsense sentences and you’ll probably get the conversations they were having all through the book. And almost every conversation ends with both of them saying okay.
So I don’t think this book was any good, hardly readable I would say. It didn’t have any chapters and that made it hard to feel that you were making any progress reading it. They’ve also made a movie about this. One and a half hour of miserable watching, still better than numerous days of reading it.
So that’s about it. No, I almost forgot.
Don’t read it!
A little bit of sarcasm may appear in this book review, please have indulgence about that.
Written by: Mattias
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