The Road: Movie Trailer

Update on The Road: the release date for this movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's harrowing post-apocalyptic novel is set for October 2009.

Here is a three minute trailer, which I promise will give you even more chills after you have read the book.

The Road

A nameless father and his son walk through an empty, chaotic, burned America. In this post-apocalyptic tale, the boy and his father must learn to survive in a world without rules, must fend for their lives in a place where acts of unthinkable horror happen every day.

Appeals: Harrowing, post-apocalyptic setting, sparse language, survival tale.

If you enjoy tales of journey and survival, you may also like What is the What by Dave Eggers, How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, and Blindness by Jose Saramago.

No trailer yet, but the movie adaptation of The Road is set to come out some time in 2009.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. 2006. 256 pages.

What is the What

Based on true life experience, Valentino Achak Deng recounts his life as a refugee from the Sudanese civil war. Starting with his life in America, What is the What traces Achak's story back to his native village of Marial Bai and his exodus through Ethiopia and Kenya. Told with clarity, humor, and unflinchingly, this tale defines the strength and resilience of the human spirit.

Appeals: Framed with a robbery experience while living in the States, readers unfamiliar with the subject and with Sudan are given a gateway to another part of the world. Amazing sense of closeness to the narrator. While enduring unthinkable hardship, any reader can relate to Achak's universal feelings of confusion, hope, love, crushes, friendship, loss and survival.

Want to read more about the effects of war and the lives of refugees? Try reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah or The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

Eggers, Dave. What is the What. 2006. 538 pages.

Rule of the Bone

Drugs. Identity. Broken families. Slavery. Ashanti warriors and Rastafarians. White privilege. Journey.

This is how I would describe Rule of the Bone.

Bone is a story of 14-year-old Chappie. Chappie hates his stepfather and is well on his way to self-destructing when he starts using and dealing drugs, stealing from his family, and running from the law. Life changes when he meets I-Man, a Jamaican mystic who starts to change Chappie's outlook on life and who starts him on a journey of self-discovery.

Ultimately, Bone is a story about finding yourself and figuring out what's important in life.

Appeals: Strong first-person narration, gritty, tale of journey and growing up

If you like this book, you might also like What is the What by Dave Eggers for a similar though very different tale of pilgrimage and discovery. Also, the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Banks, Russell. Rule of the Bone. 1995. 390 pages.