Post 12: Reading Wishlist

Reading Wishlist:
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Looking For Alaska
Paper Towns
Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children
The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
The Descendants
The Star Won't Go Out
The Last Song

Post 11: Book Talk Presentation

Post 10: Book 3 Review

Nicholas Sparks is well known for his best-selling romance novels. Although The Lucky One and Safe Haven have very different plots and characters, there are still a lot of similarities that can be seen within the characters and the way they are.  The Lucky One is about a man that finds a picture of a woman while he is at war, and his friend convinces him that it is a good luck charm. The man, Logan, decides to walk across country to find the woman because he feels he “owes” her and ends up falling in love with her and her son. In Safe Haven, a woman in an abusive relationship runs away and ends up hiding from her husband in a small town. Once there, she reluctantly falls in love with a man and his family, all while trying to remain undetected by her crazy husband.

Even with a short description of the books there are striking similarities. Within both stories are characters that are scared to fall in love and open themselves up to another person. In The Lucky One, it’s Beth, the woman in the picture that Logan finds.  She is hesitant to even befriend Logan at first because of the fact that he walked from Colorado to North Carolina and miraculously ended up in Hampton, a sleepy town. “Handsome or not, his story didn’t sit right, and she heard mental alarm bells starting to go off”(74.) Once she does, she finds herself falling hard for him but her ex-husband manages to stir up some drama that almost ruins their blossoming romance.  Katie, the main character from Safe Haven, is scared to let Alex in because of her crazy ex-husband.  Once she finally opens up to Alex and falls in love with him, her ex-husband manages to find her and threatens to destroy the new life she has created for herself with Alex and his family.  Both of these love stories involve an ex-husband who threatens to ruin the relationships that are being built. Logan and Katie both fall in love with a single parent. Beth from The Lucky One has one 10 year old son named Ben and Alex from Safe Haven has two kids, a daughter named Kristen and a son named Josh. Another similarity is that they are both set in small towns in North Carolina. If you glance to the bottom you can see that the covers of both of these books are pretty much the same thing. A man and a woman almost kissing. The woman both happen to be blonde and the men both look as if they have skipped a couple days of shaving.

Safe Haven is a combination of a romance story with some action, which is why it is such a good book. “He had the advantage because he knew she was here and she didn’t know about him…”(275.) At this point in the book, Katie’s obsessive husband has finally, after months of searching, tracked her down.  There is a lot of suspense because what happens next is unsure. Kevin, Katie’s husband, is crazy and portrayed as bipolar, at this point he houses a lot of anger but he also seems to feel guilty about his abusive past. His mood swings so quickly that it’s hard to know if when him and Katie finally run into each other he will react with anger or not. While The Lucky One does include some action, it is more centered on the relationships between Logan and Beth and Logan and Ben. This still makes for a decent story, but not one that is as hard to put down.

A man and his dog trekking across the country to find a woman that became a good luck charm to him at times of war only to fall in love with her and her family and a woman trying to escape her obsessive, abusive husband who ends up in a small town and finds herself falling for the small town shop owner and his kids lead to very different books. But when you get down to the basic plot points the similarities can’t be ignored. Although both books could be recommended to women who enjoy a good romance with a twist novel, Safe Haven is a book that could be reread and still liked. Safe Haven scores a 5 out of 5 and The Lucky One would get land somewhere between a 3 and a 4.

 

Post 9: Characters

The book, The Lucky One, by Nicholas Sparks has three narrators; Logan, more commonly known by his last name Thibault, Beth, and Beth’s ex-husband Keith Clayton. Nicholas Sparks does a great job of making the narrators Beth and Thibault really likable but added Clayton as the opposite. Thibault is caring, sensitive, and a great guy overall. On the other hand there is  Keith Clayton a rude, corrupt police officer, who also happens to be Beth’s ex-husband and the father of Beth's son.  Beth is a skeptical mother of a 10 year old boy who hires Logan to work at her dog kennel. 

Jennifer Weiner argues on the side of genre fiction, saying that she likes when she feels like she is friends with the narrator; which is exactly how you feel with both Thibault and Beth. They both possess characteristics that anyone would look for in a friend and their budding romance gives you something to hope for in the book. On the contrary, Keith Clayton gives you a type of villain, or someone to root against. He is manipulative and conniving towards Beth’s personal life, all while doing it just under her nose.

Logan easily connects with Beth’s son Ben, which helps to show what a good guy he is in the book. He allows Ben to play with his dog, Zeus and teaches him all the games that Zeus likes to play. Logan passes his lucky charm that he has had for five years on to Ben with the promise that it will keep him safe. Thibault ultimately risks his own life to save Ben, showing that he is not only caring but brave and heroic.

Not only did this book have likable narrators but it also had one that was not very likable. Keith Clayton was not likeable because he would manipulate men out of dating his ex-wife, Beth, leaving her feeling like there was something wrong with her. Clayton and Beth’s son, Ben, has an obvious dislike for his father because of the unattainable expectations he has set. Clayton is disappointed in Ben because Ben would rather play violin or chess than play sports.  Clayton’s portrayed as a slimy, no good character, obviously meant to be disliked by the reader.

Post 8: Nonfiction and Memoirs

If a book is said to be nonfiction, that’s exactly what it should be: all fact no fiction. Whether the book is good or not it needs to be labeled correctly, otherwise readers may be angry or upset when they find out the truth. If a book is embellished with things that are not true amongst a semi true book, it could instead be labeled a fiction book that is based on a true story.  If a memoir is filled with things that make the person’s life more exciting, traumatic, or devastating more people are likely to read the book. If an author is writing a memoir they should want people to read their story, not a partly true story that makes them seem a whole lot more interesting than they actually are. The author should be more concerned with getting the whole truth out in the world than getting an exaggerated version out there for the sole purpose of selling more copies.

I don’t think Frey had the right to add details to his memoir, I feel like if the book is published as a memoir it should tell the story as it happened. Frey only decided to make his book a memoir because he knew that if people believed it was a true story they would be more interested in reading it. I think that people like to read true stories versus fiction because it seems hard to believe that stuff that happens in memoirs actually happened to real people. In fiction, anything is believable because you can create new worlds, devastating events, unbelievable luck, and unfortunate circumstances; nothing actually has to have been experienced. I believe that that’s what makes memoirs so intriguing; the fact that people have triumphed over these hardships and carried on with their lives, and if people are adding false facts to their writing I think the whole purpose of a memoir has been breached.