Gritty, atmospheric adaptation that should appeal to both McCarthy fans and curious new readers alike.

Drawing are very dark and it was difficult to view on an iPhone. A larger device or actual book might make for a better experience. I haven't read the novel but the images in this graphic novel were haunting. I was pulled into the story of a boy and his father trying to navigate a hostile and desolate terrain.

3.5 stars

Since becoming a parent any story involving children in danger has become increasingly harrowing to read, especially horrifying and sad stories like this one. Years ago, when I first read the novel (nearly 15 years before becoming a father) the mental image of a baby on a spit roast was enough to make me queasy. Seeing it drawn out in stark black and white nearly made me throw up. Not because it was an especially gory image, in fact it was almost obscured by artful crosshatching. It was this balance of hiding and revealing an image that Larcenet strikes which makes it all the more powerful. The imagery is the strongest part of this adaptation. The wasting bodies, the barren landscapes, the extreme weather. All true to McCarthy's vision but distinct from the film version. There are some small changes to the narrative and they mostly work to streamline the story for this medium.

Mainly, Larcenet takes CM's long stretches of narrative about the landscapes and turns them into visceral images. Yes, I think something is lost in that. Which is why I think there is a fair conversation to be had about the need for graphic adaptations of novels. In short, I think it feeds a bit of the pervasive intellectual laziness of our culture. I can picture my Gen Z students reading this or watching the film rather than engaging with the original text. The reason I see this as a problem is it deprives the reader's brain of the experience of turning the abstract symbols of language into a picture in their own mind. It allows them to lazily adopt someone else's masterfully crafted image as their own. This may be a bit of a harsh reaction to the graphic novel, and admittedly I am writing it with less than ten days left in a school year so I am especially frosty at this point. But, reading through this adaptation made me think of it. So, there you have it.

Worth a read for fans. Read the book first.

Thanks to Larcenet and Abrams ComicArts for the Advanced Reader Copy.

This is eerie and a really powerful adaptation.

I read this ages ago, and forgot how brutal it was, and almost to a fault, this graphic adaptation keeps to the brutal nature of the original!

A uniquely illustrated, haunting adaptation.

Absolutely stunning! It had been about 20 years since I read The Road, but this graphic truly brought it back to life. Simple, gritty, and emotional.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is a classic piece of American literature. One I have heard about many times, but have not yet read. When I saw the ARC of the graphic novel adaptation, I jumped at the chance to read it. Having done so, I'm glad I opted for the graphic novel version. The post apocalyptic story is heavy, and sad. The bond between father and son is deep and tender, but also so very fragile. Life in this world is fragile. Manu Larcenet wrote and illustrated a haunting, yet accessible version of what I can only imagine is a tough story to read.

The ARC is black and white only, but the preview images shown in color portray an even more detailed and graphically beautiful story. I will definitely be purchasing this for my adult graphic novel collection.

Thank you to NetGalley and Abrams Comic Arts for the egalley copy. All opinions are my own.

I really loved the novel of The Road. Although it is stark and harrowing, it was beautifully written.

The graphic novel, however, is just harrowing. I was disappointed.

I’m sure there will be people who love it, but it just wasn’t for me.

This is a haunting and beautiful adaptation of the novel. I’m in awe of the visuals and how they conveyed the emotions and intense tone of the story. I will be buying this when it is released, for sure.

A stark and darkly haunting rendition of one of McCarthy's great masterworks, The Road. I found the artwork to be absolutely beautiful, in its very macabre way, and this version of the father and son's journey through the wastelands is just as touching and tense as in its original novel form. There's very little dialogue, and this only adds to the atmosphere of solitude and desolation. I read this through in one sitting as I couldn't put it down. I think it'll look very striking in full colour, and would be a great addition to an adult graphic novel collection. Thank you for allowing me to read this digital arc!

**scheculed to publish on August 16
My Thoughts:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a dystopian adult novel about a father and his son who are in a post apocalyptic world where they are trying to survive, stay away from hordes of Zombie-like gangs and not die in the process. This novel was so difficult to get through and so disturbing that I talked my husband into reading the book with me. He tried and then refused to finish it. I was disturbed by the struggle. I almost with there were Zombies as they would be less scary than gangs of desperate and starving human beings. For my husband, he could not get over McCarthy's writing style. His big beef was on the author's use of 50 words in a sentence to say something that could be written much simpler with the same effect. It was just too wordy for him and this road was dragging on too long so he abandoned it. I slogged through because I needed to get to the end of the road, or death, or whatever came first, but I was not having fun slogging through. I also want to say that Cormac McCarthy died last summer (June 2023) at 89, so I am not trying to speak ill of this American author who has garnered multiple writing awards, however, his outlook on America and humanity is dark, dark, dark, so I am not saying anything new.

What I wanted to focus on is not the tone of his story, but on the issue my husband has, which is McCarthy's prose style which is just difficult to read. He does not write for the common man/woman. He does not have much wit to him. His vocabulary tends to be pedantic. So if you take away the prose and stick with the tone and premise of a father and son trying to get to the coast in a post apocalyptic world, as readers we are faced with a more familiar story of survival and the ability of the young son to keep his humanity while the father tries to protect him from seeing the horrors that will stick in his memory.

Manu Larcenet does a fabulous job of keeping the feeling of cold, hunger and sorrow within his illustrations. He does not need a lot of words to tell this story. However, the conversations that he does include in the book gives us just enough horror and hope. Job well done! The Road in this adaptation is just as haunting as the original, but I would use this adaptation over the original for a literature group choice if we are looking at dystopia or post apocalyptic pieces caused by climate change, natural disasters, or man made disasters.

Suggestions for Curriculum and Classroom Use:
Thematic Currents:
Death in a Dying World
Humanity and Ethics
Philosophy of Survival
Parent/Child or Father/Son relationships
Survival
Activity:
Literature workshop on dystopia - if you are not sure how to do a literature workshop in a secondary classroom, this blog post is not enough time to go over it. I would need a whole semester of an English methods course to even introduce it, however, Sheridan Blau has a great book called The Literature Workshop by Heinemann Publishers. Check that out and choose something to try. I trust this publisher as they print books by teacher practitioners rather than education scholars who have not set foot in a K-12 classroom in many years. Chapter 2 is about the power of rereading. Although they use a poem, imaging doing a rereading of some key scenes of this graphic novel so that students "read" the illustrations and sparse text to have students go through the process and also record their understanding as they reread
Other books that can be paired with this graphic novel:
Life as We Knew It series by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Hiroshima by John Hersey
Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakagawa (graphic by an atomic bomb survivor)
Publication Information:
Illustrator: Manu Larcenet
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts (September 17, 2024)
Hardcover: 160 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1419776779
Reading Age: 13 years and up

Art reminds me of Toppi at points. Well executed adaptation of the source material. Very good. Suitably bleak.

Cormac McCarthy is a master of fiction, and The Road is one of the best dystopians of all time. This is such a neat visual way to read the book

Such a dark, devastating book, and the graphic novel adaptation does every bleak corner of McCarthy's world in The Road justice. What I enjoyed the most was the use of the quiet scenes. The Road isn't a very conversation-heavy book by nature, and Manu Larcenet embraced those quiet, heartbreaking moments with somber ease in his artwork. Exceptionally and tastefully done.

I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and thought it was one of the saddest, bleakest books I'd ever read. I wanted to put it down but something about its dark beauty kept me reading. The same is true of this graphic novel adaptation. The intricate art is stunning. Still a damn sad story.

Thank you for this ARC. All black & white. Can't wait for the color version.
Like the novel, this is a hard book to create. So many silent still and pages. Very few words. Yet as you see each frame and read each selected word, you get immersed. And as you reach the end, your emotions and decisions get the best of you.
Wonderfully done.
I just reviewed The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Cormac McCarthy. #TheRoadAGraphicNovelAdaptation #NetGalley

The Road, a Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic classic by Cormac McCarthy, has been adapted into a graphic novel for the very first time. Stunningly illustrated by acclaimed French cartoonist Manu Larcenet, The Road Graphic Novel brings an additional layer of visual storytelling to McCarthy's stark and heart-wrenching tale of survival in a desolate world.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.

This graphic novel is not the first adaptation of The Road, including a feature film released in 2009, but this graphic novel definitely reads almost as wonderful as the original source material. Nothing will ever beat reading The Road for the first time, but what Larcenet is able to do with this graphic novel adaptation is simply outstanding.

Larcenet gives us illustrations that are both simple and extremely detailed. Each panel conveys the raw emotion and desperation of the characters and the world they are trying to survive. The stunning visuals evoke a sense of isolation and despair, while complimenting McCarthy's writing. While the original novel gave us an idea what the world and characters looked like, the graphic novel format allows us to immerse ourselves in the story in a whole new way.

In The Road Graphic Novel, Larcenet allows his artwork to do the work with limited speaking. This gives us the ability to take in the expansive world the father and son are trying to traverse as well as show how desolate and lonely the world is after the post-apocalyptic events.

When we heard The Road was getting a graphic novel adaptation we were both exciting and nervous. The original novel resonated deep with us as a father and when we watched the film we lost a bit of the impact of the novel. When we read that this adaptation as coming we were afraid it might do the same. However, The Road Graphic Novel just added to the amazing story told by McCarthy almost 20 years ago. We now feel when we share this story with others we have multiple options to read.

The Road Graphic Novel is a stunning and wonderful adaptation that captures the heart-wrenching story told by Cormac McCarthy in 2006 while adding excellent illustrations to enhance our reading experience. Manu Larcenet's illustrations bring to life the haunting tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic world with depth and emotion. This truly is a extremely well done adaptation and should be experienced by all.

(I received this book from the editor and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review)
Manu Larcenet’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is just stunning. And let me emphasize something: it is Manu Larcenet’s adaptation. We all know who the original author is, and it is good that he himself approved it, but what really makes this adaptation great, what makes it stand out, is the art, the bleak depiction of the post-apocalyptic world and the dread of knowing that something we read and felt disgusted about will pop out any moment.
I personally really liked Cormac McCarthy’s original novel, but I know a lot of people who could not digest the repetitions and dullness of day after day of walking, hiding and thinking about death. Manu Larcenet’s adaptation still follows this monotony, but it does not feel as heavy. I really think this makes it more accessible to a general reader, both connoisseurs of the novel, those who only watched the movie, and even people who enter this world for the first time.
This comic book is, without any doubts, a masterpiece.

I have a confession to make. I actually didn’t like the original novel. But this? This was fantastic! It made everything I disliked about the Road disappear. The weird writing style, the repetitiveness, the slow pacing, all of it gone.

I found the book so hard to put down that I actually ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting.

The best part of the graphic novel is the artwork. Every time I turned the page I had to pause just to take everything in. It’s cold and dreary, and it feels incredibly lonely. The characters were so life-like, and expressive in between the dialogue.

The graphic novel version of The Road is easily a 5-star read, I highly recommend checking this one out when it comes out on September 17.

A huge thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the gifted copy!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this!!!! I love the Road. It was my introduction to apocalyptic fiction and people being the monsters. To see this book that I compare to every apocalypse book come to life in graphic novel format is amazing. I love it. The expressions, the drawing, and seeing the way it unfolds because this is not a book with a lot of description making it the perfect adaptation. Get it, buy it, borrow it from a library, and enjoy.