Expecting a clean, spartan piece of literature, I was really disappointed to discover that Matteo Righetto's Soul of the Border is in fact a bowdlerised Cormac McCarthy for a YA audience, and just as unpromising as that sounds. Opening with a quote from McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, the first of the Border Trilogy, Righetto is clearly trying to imitate the American with his own 'Trilogia della Patria'. But, despite some nifty marketing sheen presenting it as a dignified literary piece, Soul of the Border is a novel entirely lacking in depth and storytelling nous.

I was surprised at how clumsy this one was, because Italian writing seems to be in a relatively healthy place at the moment. But Righetto's book has sketchy characterisation, a clichéd plotline and some of the most hackneyed similes and introspection I've read in a while. Some disappointed reviewers have speculated that perhaps the story hasn't translated well into English, but I've read Howard Curtis' translations of Pietro Grossi from the Italian and they've been fine. The dearth of quality is entirely on Righetto. Consider the following selected passages:

"She remembered her mother, brother and sister. At the thought of them, she was moved. They felt so close and yet so far." (pg. 85)
"'Running away? What from?' 'From a black man with a black horse… and my nightmares.'" (pg. 163)
"In a few moments, the fear and the adrenaline had swept away all her sleepiness, all the symptoms of fatigue, and she had regained the vitality and the speed of reflex of a squirrel when faced with danger." (pg. 104)
"She had the feeling she had passed this way, not twenty-four hours ago, but weeks, if not months earlier!" (pg. 150)

Soul of the Border doesn't even use its landscape well: the Alpine border wilderness should be a rich setting, but it remains all but completely unevoked in this novel. The titular motif and the other attempts at profundity are almost embarrassing. The most constructive criticism I can make is that we are told the story too often – what to think and feel, what is happening functionally – and never are we drawn into it. But that's as far as my goodwill extends. By the time the novel's teenage girl protagonist (that should have been my first warning) tells us that "Dandelion Flower will be my battle cry!" (pg. 164), the book no longer smacks of YA, but is beating us over the head with it quite relentlessly.

The final act of the story wouldn't excel in a high-school writing competition, and from first page to last the novel fails to be anything other than a paint-by-numbers sketch bereft of authorial talent. And, in going over my notes, I've just noticed that one of its better lines ("When a lamb is lost on the mountains, it bleats loudly. Sometimes a wolf comes, but sometimes its mother comes" (pg. 163)) has been lifted – and, again, bowdlerised – from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. This artless facsimile is one to avoid. ( )