More Than a Pretty Horse

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
New York : Knopf, c1992.
301 p. ; 22 cm.

I first read this book about fifteen years ago. I read it then because it had won the National Book Award and for the first few pages, I was not impressed. It almost seemed like a parody of Hemingway with its short, sparse sentences - but then, wow! it grabbed me with its lush romantic beauty and gorgeous descriptions and never let go.  Cormac McCarthy has become something of a major literary figure in American fiction, and so I wanted to revisit his novel ( I had planned to read all three of his "Border Trilogy" works, but only made it through the second one, The Crossing.)

All the Pretty Horses works as a love story, a coming of age novel, a quest novel, and and ode to the end of the horseback riders era in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

The book is in many ways a tale of moralities.  What are the bonds of loyalty, friendship, family, and, of course, love?  It is a tale of integrity, of human-animal interdependence, of the beauty of the land and of the powers of goodness and evil.

I would definitely recommend this book to a student looking for a literary, but very readable and compelling novel.