All the Pretty Horses

This is definitely not a book I would have picked up my own, and I may have given up on it before 100 pages if I wasn’t reading it for a class. As Shuttsie knows, the western is not my favorite genre, thus my reluctance to read Lonesome Dove despite her best efforts for the past ten years or so, although you could argue that ATPH is not really a western. The story follows John Grady Cole, sixteen, and his friend Rawlins as they travel to Mexico to work on a ranch. The beginning of the book is filled with long stretches of the weather and the landscape and endless searches for water. It picks up once the boys meet another boy, Jimmy Blevins, who ends up getting them in trouble later on in the story. The boys find work on a ranch in Mexico where John Grady falls in love with the rancher’s daughter, never a good sign. There are some beautiful passages in McCarthy’s writing once you get past the lack of punctuation.