‘A Walk to Remember’ by Nicholas Sparks – This book was on my ‘books to read’ list for quite sometime now, after reading about it in Nithya’s and Priya’s blogs. I finally read it day before yesterday and I loved it. It has been a long time since I finished reading a book on a single day. Oh yeah the book indeed wasn’t a huge one but that was not the reason why I finished reading it in a few hours. It was so riveting that I couldn’t put it down at all.

To begin with, I hate sad stories. After all, who wants to cry over what happens to the characters in a novel? But, ever since I started reading Erich Segal’s books, which, by the way, you will surely get reminded of while reading ‘A walk to remember’, I was awed so much by how the man had captured and portrayed the human emotions so well, that I couldn’t resist reading all his novels in one go even though I was left feeling sad for atleast one character at the end of each of his novels. So, that’s when I developed a liking for sad stories even though I am not sure if I am happy with the way the characters and the pains they undergo leave an everlasting, deep impact on me.

Coming back to ‘A Walk to Remember’ which, by the way, seemed to me to be too similar to Erich Segal’s ‘Love Story’ in some ways, little did I expect in the beginning that the emotions of the characters would be as profoundly brought out by Nicholas Sparks as done by Erich Segal. At the end of it, not only was I feeling a mixture of happiness and sadness for the couple, Landon and Jamie, the lead characters of the story, but I was also happy that I had found another author whose works I am going to start reading and hopefully enjoy as well.

As Landon starts narrating his story, you feel as though you are with him throughout and see him experiencing all the emotions he goes through. A powerful narration! The transformation of Landon from a guy who doesn’t care the least about how he might be hurting the feelings of Jamie and her father, to a person who falls in love with Jamie and makes sure he does everything he can to try and keep her happy even as she is dying and he himself is going through a dozen emotions, couldn’t have been brought out in a better way!

When Landon visits the orphanage with Jamie and sees the orphans, the thoughts on his mind about how very less toys those kids have and how his own child hood was, later the guilt with which Landon is consumed when he is asked by Jamie to collect the boxes that she had kept in shops for collecting money for the orphans, the very same ones into which he and his friends threw junk items, Landon adding his own money to what was collected from the boxes and Jamie’s happiness on looking at the amount of money collected – these are all moments that are so touching.

In the beginning, everytime Jamie talks about the Lord’s plan and praying for others, along with Landon, you find yourself letting out a groan wondering how on earth a girl can keep talking about Lord all the time. But as you get to know more about Jamie along with Landon and when she tells him out of the blue that she is dying, you can’t help but question the Lord’s plans in letting a young girl, one of the finest human beings, die so soon. You are awed by how happy and cheerful Jamie had sounded all along without giving a hint that she was fighting death. This sort of characters always affects me a lot. From the moment Jamie tells that she is suffering from leukemia, I had a tough time reading the remaining pages of the book. Please do have a tissue ready with you while you are reading those pages!

‘A walk to remember’ is a book to remember! A book that I am not going to forget for the rest of my life!