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Summary: This is NOT for teenagers...
Review: I was moved to write this review because of the number of badly written and uninformed reviews I read at this very site. McMarty's novel is elegant, brilliantly written in the Faulknerian tradition, evokes Melville and Dante, and is the most heartbreaking book I have ever read. Perhaps the nearing release of the movie has caused more teenagers to read the novel, but it's clear that many were not prepared for it. It's not an easy read. It's not for kids. It is for those who appreciate great literature and have the background to take on the contemporary modernist style that McCarthy uses. If you think you can handle these things, stop reading this review and go start reading right now.
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Summary: Spanish 101
Review: Excellent reading. Some people complain about the use of Spanish in parts of the book. I think it ads to the realism. You can log on to cormacmccarthy.com to get the translations for all three books in the border trilogy.
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Summary: A touchstone of American fiction
Review: I read this book a few years ago now and reread it whenever I want to remember what real writing is like. There is a musicality in the phrasing, the way the sentences fall onto the pages like a scattering of seed. McCarthy is brave enough, and trusts his powers of illumination enough to explain very little. The reader is simply left to either pick up those seeds or leave them be and move on. Though the book is really about all humanity McCarthy chooses simple people to tell his story. John Grady, Blevins, Alejandra and the Duena Alfonsa are at once real people and works of art. As a vignette of the book and in fact Cormac McCarthy's whole style, read the short passage in the middle of the book where Alejandra comes riding down out of the mountains with a thunderstorm building behind her. The author puts more power in that one scene that most writers summon in a career. As one of the early reviews said - trust me, this is a journey worth taking.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth reading, but overrated.
Review: McCarthy deserves credit for drawing so much out of such desolation: the desolation of the desert and the desolation of his characters. "Desolate" because although they mouth pithy lines, they never break into speech, never become more than pasted pictures dealing with the realities of horses and cowboy life. Cowboy life is not inherently interesting, even to cowboys. It's incremental, monotonous work: an apt description of this book. McCarthy's biggest failing is, with the exception of his hero's tightly controlled grief and his love for horses, an inability to write about emotion. The starkness of the landscape, hitched to an equal starkness of feeling, does not produce much in the way of insights on our lives--presumably the goal of every serious artist. These and other problems will nag at you as you read the book, along with the Spanish. It's possible to write great fiction using Spanish, in fact. See Cervantes, Marques, Dario..but it's hard to write good English and Spanish at the same time in the same book, as Pretty Horses unintentionally demonstrates. Still, it's serious fiction. Also, it's authentic and it's American, two attributes that hardly ever occur as a description of a single thing, let alone literature. You may not cry for hours at the end, but you probably won't regret the read. Buy it. END
Rating:
Summary: extremely engaging
Review: It's one of those books that it takes you the first fifty, or so, pages to get into, but once you're past that I would be surprised if you could put it down. It was an excellent book that gives you all the aspects that an enjoyable book should have: adventure, romance, danger, etc.
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Summary: When in doubt, find it on audiobook...
Review: I read All the Pretty Horses about two years ago, and although I enjoyed the physical descriptions of the land (and I absolutely fell in love with John Grady Cole), I found Cormac McCarthy's writing style to be very odd. I wasn't used to tripping through pages of dialogue with no quotation marks to guide me! I think that, although McCarthy should be free to write in any style he wishes, to a casual reader like myself his style detracts from the pleasure of reading the book. If you, like me, don't want to wrestle through the novel itself, then I recommend getting the audiobook, read by Brad Pitt. Brad adapts a soft, slightly monotonous reading style that is perfect for the book and for its two sequels, and he really gets into it during the more spirited dialogues! Some of McCarthy's true literary fans will probably want to shoot me through the head for suggesting the audiobook, but I figure it's better to hear the story read to you than to never discover the story at all.
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Summary: Just Read It!
Review: A classic American novel. Cormac McCarthy weaves an incredible tale about these young Texans and their fateful trek to Mexico. I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy and you should not wait to begin it. It was fantastic and unforgetable.
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Summary: this is an award winner?
Review: McCarthy's strange and inventive way of writing with no quotations and few apostrophies is not, to me, correct grammar. His run on sentences, some with more than 10 "ands" in them, are very distracting. If someone is going to give a person an award for a book, I think they should have guidelines, such as using correct english.
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Summary: I Love This Book
Review: I recomend This Book for kids 7-14 Its won of the best Books I ever Read PLEASE BELIVE ME!!!
Rating: 
Summary: All the pretty conjunctions
Review: I though the book was O.K. and that it was thoughtful and evocative of emotion at some points but that the overwhelming problem with it was the never-ending continuation of sentences which began to get on my nerves and admit it got on yours too especially since there was no punctuation whatsoever in many cases and you just got more and more frustrated as he just kept refusing to add a single comma and if he had it certainly would have helped a little bit and in conclusion while this was an interesting and at times very emotional while remaining intellectually objective book I just got sick of the lack of punctuation and frankly I dont think I would read other stuff by the guy until he learns to drop the conjunctions for once and finish a simple sentence.
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