First Quarter ORB Review

The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks. Grand Central Publishing, 2009. Genre: Fiction

The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks is about 17 year old Ronnie who is sent from New York, by her mother, to spend the summer in North Carolina with her Father. Ronnie’s parents were divorced when she was younger and she hasn’t talked to her father ever since. She plans on spending her summer avoiding her father and talking to him the least she can. But somehow she finds herself falling for a boy that is not her type and reconnecting with her dad that she hasn’t talked to in four years. This story is about first loves and love between parent and child.

The publisher raves “The tale that unfolds is an unforgettable story of love on many levels—first love, love between parents and children — that demonstrates, as only a Nicholas Sparks novel can, the many ways that love can break our hearts...and heal them.”
The story is told from four different points of view: Ronnie's, Steve's, Marcus', and Will's. Each person's stories comes together to tell the story of what happens to Ronnie that summer. The Last Song reminded me a lot of My Sister’s Keeper. Not that the topics are a little similar, but the way both are written. Picoult is known for her novels being told from different points of view and in Spark’s newest novel, he does the same. I enjoyed this because it is different than Sparks’ other pieces that I have read. Although this novel is similar to his other pieces because of his very descriptive writing, and his subject of love.

“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is a mystery, in the end there is conformation, but it’s in the middle where all emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile” (376)

I became interested in Sparks’ work after seeing the movie The Notebook. I read The Notebook within a few days and decided the novel was much better than the movie. Over the summer I found out that Sparks’ was working on a new book, so I had my dad preorder it for me. It came in the second week of September and I read the whole book within a week. I don’t enjoy reading that much, but there’s something about Sparks’ novels that doesn’t allow me to put them down.