The Notebook
by Nicholas Sparks
Series: Notebook #1
Series Rating:
Published by Bantam on July 5th 2004
Genres: Chick Lit
Pages: 214
Format: Paperback
Goodreads
Set amid the austere beauty of the North Carolina coast, The Notebook begins with the story of Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner recently returned from the Second World War. Noah is restoring a plantation home to its former glory, and he is haunted by images of the beautiful girl he met fourteen years earlier, a girl he loved like no other. Unable to find her, yet unwilling to forget the summer they spent together, Noah is content to live with only memories...until she unexpectedly returns to his town to see him once again.
Like a puzzle within a puzzle, the story of Noah and Allie is just the beginning. As it unfolds, their tale miraculously becomes something different, with much higher stakes. The result is a deeply moving portrait of love itself, the tender moments and the fundamental changes that affect us all. It is a story of miracles and emotions that will stay with you forever.
My take on this book: The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks is an excellent book that almost anyone could read. One that has a happy ending while in certain parts of the book it will make you cry. The tears won’t be sad instead they will happy tears. Tears that make anyone feel like they could have a love like that one day. I feel bad for Noah having to deal with seeing his wife but not really seeing her.
Mr. Sparks has this way with words that makes the reader believe in whatever he is writing about like he does with The Notebook. The thing that he wants you to believe in is that your first love is the one that you are meant to spend the rest of your life with and when they leave you feel like you are missing something that you don’t realize you’re missing until you look back at those memories. That make you realize with what you are missing. Or when you try to move on but are just wasting time searching for your first love while not finding it in the person that you are dating with at the time.
Granted I don’t know many people like this but I know of some people that are married to that wasn’t their first love. It is the look in their eyes that you can see from not even reading this book to know that they have found their true love and that they aren’t going to let that person go without a fight. I see it every day with my mom and step dad and through pictures of my cousins through Facebook. I am very happy to know that they have found their true love and that they won’t stop fighting for them if they have to. I hope that they don’t have to go through the pain that Noah does in this book.
I am giving this book a five stars rating because it is good and I couldn’t put the book down once I got into it. I can’t wait to read another book. I will also love to recommend it to anyone that would like to read it.
Anyways until the next time enjoy this book review brought to you by
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**Where to find this book**
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About Nicholas Sparks
As a child, Nicholas Sparks lived in Minnesota, Los Angeles, and Grand Island, Nebraska, finally settling in Fair Oaks, California at the age of eight. His father was a professor, his mother a homemaker, then optometrist’s assistant. He lived in Fair Oaks through high school, graduated valedictorian in 1984, and received a full track scholarship to the University of Notre Dame.
After breaking the Notre Dame school record as part of a relay team in 1985 as a freshman (a record which still stands), he was injured and spent the summer recovering. During that summer, he wrote his first novel, though it was never published. He majored in Business Finance and graduated with high honors in 1988.
He and his wife Catherine, who met on spring break in 1988, were married in July, 1989. While living in Sacramento, he wrote his second novel that same year, though again, it wasn’t published. He worked a variety of jobs over the next three years, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone, and started his own small manufacturing business which struggled from the beginning. In 1990, he collaborated on a book with Billy Mills, the Olympic Gold Medalist and it was published by Feather Publishing before later being picked up by Random House. (It was recently re-issued by Hay House Books.) Though it received scant publicity, sales topped 50,000 copies in the first year of release.
He began selling pharmaceuticals and moved from Sacramento, California to North Carolina in 1992. In 1994, at the age of 28, he wrote The Notebook over a period of six months. In October, 1995, rights to The Notebook were sold to Warner Books. It was published in October, 1996, and he followed that with Message in a Bottle (1998), A Walk to Remember (1999), The Rescue (2000), A Bend in the Road (2001), and Nights in Rodanthe (2002), The Guardian (2003), The Wedding (2003), Three Weeks with my Brother (2004), True Believer (2005) and At First Sight (2005) all with Warner Books. All were domestic and international best sellers and were translated into more than 35 languages. The movie version of Message in a Bottle was released in 1999, A Walk to Remember was released in 2002, and The Notebook was released in 2004. The average domestic box office gross per film was $56 million — with another $100 million in DVD sales — making the novels by Nicholas Sparks one of the most successful franchises in Hollywood.
The film rights to Nights in Rodanthe, True Believer and At First Sight have been sold, and Nicholas Sparks has written the screenplay for The Guardian, though he has not offered it for sale at this point.
He now has five children: Miles, Ryan, Landon, Lexie, and Savannah. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and children.
