A Walk to Remember

Nicholas Sparks is a modern master of fateful love stories and road-not-taken fables written in uncluttered prose. A Walk to Remember is perfect autumn fiction when thoughts turn to changes and life’s journeys, both mapped and unmapped.This novel is a bit of twisted take on your average romance novel. Instead of the good girl falling for the bad boy, it’s more of the other way round.

In A Walk to Remember, Landon Carter narrates the flashback story of his senior year in the late 1950s at Beaufort High in Beaufort, North Carolina, when he first discovers the power of love.

The Carters are a family whose wealth was built on a grandfather’s profits from bootlegging. Compounding the lack of strong male figures in Landon’s life is his hypocritical congressman father, who rarely spends time at home. Neglect pushes Landon to develop a rebellious streak, and at the start of the story, he is both adrift and certain, confident and susceptible to peer opinion, in other words, a typical teenager. Jamie Sullivan is the daughter of a local minister and the goody-two-shoes of the school. Jamie is such social poison to Landon’s insecure circle that he avoids her at all costs, until, as the newly elected class president desperate for a date to the dance, he asks her, certain that she’ll be available. She accepts, and that night Jamie helps Landon out of an embarrassing bind, revealing a strong character that intrigues him despite her relentless and isolating Christianity.

After Jamie asks Landon to star in the school’s Christmas play, a town tradition which her father instituted, he develops a gradual and reluctant relationship with her. They rehearse, they walk home, they talk; when opening night arrives and Landon sees Jamie in an angelic costume, he realizes that he’s fallen in love. Bewildered and ecstatic, they nurture their feelings until Jamie reveals the secret that forces Landon to realize what he holds most dear, despite what fate has handed them.

The greatest thing I liked about this book is the profound messages of the story beyond what are written, though some are already given. I liked how faith works at Jamie, that even though everything has been taken from her, she dignifies how her faith still remains. I was also touched at how simply a very kind person could turn the people oppositely to what they were. There is an even presence of the true effects of love, which it leads the in love human to think either sane or insane. And the story, in a way, emphasizes how humans should give attention, importance and deeper understanding of the things that surround them not until it’s too late. And the best of all is how faith can bring out the miracle to the surface out of the deepest pit.

In all, “A Walk to Remember” is a story of a teenage love, with an unlikely beginning and an unexpected and tragic ending. It’s about friendship, love, and what “really matters”

Reviewed by – Aditi Jain