Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by nicolaburton
The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
1.0
Yes, I liked the story. Guy meets girl, fall in love, face some kind of adversity, fall in love all over again, live a fairytale life, twinge on the heartstrings at the end.
But - The Notebook is incredibly poorly written. I may be cynical, but considering many of Nicholas Sparks' other books (which I haven't read) have been turned into films, I imagine that Sparks' goal when writing this was to get a film made of it - whilst picking up the profits of a novel along the way.
Each scene is described blandly; the prose is little more than shoddily-disguised stage directions. ('The thunder boomed loudly. Her shirt was see-through. He looked at her damp skin. She saw him look. They sat in front of the fire. They touched. They had sex. They had sex again. And again. They went to bed.')
The disappointing thing is that there was plenty of room for this novel to expand into something much more impressive. Did the war have any psychological impact on Noah? No, it seems; the war served the purpose of filling the blank years necessary before the lovers reunite against the odds. What was Allie's relationship really like with Lon? How did she really deal with the internal conflict of loving two people simultaneously? Again, Lon is nothing more than a plot device. Ditto for Allie's mother, with her walk-on walk-off role.
I'm not saying that The Notebook isn't a good story - read it if you want to spend two hours reading something gooey instead of watching something gooey. Just be prepared that this doesn't have any literary pretensions whatsoever, nor any real claim on being a novel. It's a means to an end, and that end is a crowd-pleasing, chart-topping chick flick.
But - The Notebook is incredibly poorly written. I may be cynical, but considering many of Nicholas Sparks' other books (which I haven't read) have been turned into films, I imagine that Sparks' goal when writing this was to get a film made of it - whilst picking up the profits of a novel along the way.
Each scene is described blandly; the prose is little more than shoddily-disguised stage directions. ('The thunder boomed loudly. Her shirt was see-through. He looked at her damp skin. She saw him look. They sat in front of the fire. They touched. They had sex. They had sex again. And again. They went to bed.')
The disappointing thing is that there was plenty of room for this novel to expand into something much more impressive. Did the war have any psychological impact on Noah? No, it seems; the war served the purpose of filling the blank years necessary before the lovers reunite against the odds. What was Allie's relationship really like with Lon? How did she really deal with the internal conflict of loving two people simultaneously? Again, Lon is nothing more than a plot device. Ditto for Allie's mother, with her walk-on walk-off role.
I'm not saying that The Notebook isn't a good story - read it if you want to spend two hours reading something gooey instead of watching something gooey. Just be prepared that this doesn't have any literary pretensions whatsoever, nor any real claim on being a novel. It's a means to an end, and that end is a crowd-pleasing, chart-topping chick flick.