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.