All the Pretty Horses is a book in the eleventh grade curriculum that, to say the least, is controversial. Many people love it but many people also detest it. The people who love it may say that it’s a simple story of a boy who feels lost and tries to find himself in the beauty of the open land of the Southwest. They would say that Cormac McCarthy explained this beautifully, and his unique prose is unparalleled to anything written before him.

The people who hate it would say that it is a confusing book with no quotation marks that is unnecessarily complicated with imagery stacked about imagery which is about to fall down like a game of Jenga that I played with little kids that reminds me of my youth when things were simple and before the accident and before the house was sold and it was a simple time and it was the last time I was happy. That is an example of the type of writing from the novel, with the haters commenting on the lack of commas and the run-on nature of the sentence. 

I would include myself square in the middle of the lovers and the haters. I could keep up with the novel for the most part, and I got used to the writing style over reading it and it got easier. I liked the story and felt that I could identify with John Grady Cole. It was a book about a sixteen-year old boy growing into a man, and I enjoyed the fact that for once in school I read a book about someone I could actually relate to.

Even though I could understand McCarthy’s style, that did not mean I thought it was brilliant. I liked how original it was and how it was different from any other book I had read before, but it did not amaze me. I was impressed, but it was not a life-altering novel. Now please let me play my game of Jenga in order to feel that life matters at all.