Now For The Unexpected

Dear John - Nicholas Sparks 5/5 stars
                                                     
      I assure you that no one has hijacked my blog and I am for the most part of sound mind. Sometimes it's perfectly acceptable to step outside your comfort zone and read something different. As a writer I usually genre jump just to see what else is out there. It's important to check out other styles just to see what you can learn from it. I had heard of Sparks but never read any of his work. I was looking for something different to read and figured why not read one of his books.

     The thing I liked about Dear John was that it was easy to read and written in a way that allows you to become involved in the story. In popular fiction sometimes you get characters that are one dimensional and not very interesting. Here Sparks gives us John a soldier who falls in love with Savannah but it's not your typical love story. I am in no way shape or form a guy that reads romance novels but I guess in a Sparks novel it comes with the territory. These characters are what drives the novel. You expect things to end a certain way but they don't. Dear John isn't the kind of novel you read and feel good. You end up frustrated at the way it all ends, but that's what makes it so good. Despite being a popular author he doesn't take the easy way out to make his readers happy. It's an engaging novel about loss, and love. I bet you never thought you'd see me ever write those words.

     I enjoyed Sparks writing style a great deal. He knows that if you have a decent story with characters that grab your attention people will read it. You keep reading to see if Savannah and John will finally be together and you also have the relationship between John and his father. I wish this had been explored more, but with the main story this was just a side plot to give John even more depth or maybe even shallowness. Regardless of that I actually became a Nicholas Sparks fan which seems crazy because it's so unexpected. The thing is that there are plenty of people that hate Sparks because of the type of stuff he writes, but as a popular fiction writer he has certainly found an audience. Dear John is a pretty solid read.

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