Book Review

The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks is predictable but it still managed to surprise me.

Written by Caroline Hackett

Pros:fast and easy read, interesting

Cons:predictable if you've read other Sparks novels

The Bottom Line: This novel is much better than the last few Sparks books. After reading several mediocre ones, The Lucky One revived my interest in the next Sparks story.

I've read all of the books written by Nicholas Sparks. In my opinion, the first few were brilliant but his writing has been on a decline ever since. After reading "The Guardian" and being disappointed with it, I vowed to stop actually buying the books and instead borrow them when I could. When I saw that The Lucky One had been released, I reluctently bought it. A couple of months later, I finally had my opportunity to read this novel.

The Lucky One centers around Logan Thibault, an ex-marine who found a picture of a young woman in a Kuwaiti desert during his first tour of duty. He pins the photo to the message bulletin board and expects it to be claimed. Several weeks later, it is still there so he removes it and places it in his pocket... and it remains there through all three tours of duty and all of the dangerous situations in which he finds himself. Logan's friends and fellow soldiers die all around him, but he always manages to evade death and escape relatively unharmed. He considers the picture a "lucky charm" and decides to try to find the woman when he gets back to the States.

The picture shows a Hampton Fair banner, so he winds up walking from his home in Colorado to Hampton, North Carolina. He doesn't have high hopes for finding his lucky charm lady, which makes it extraordinary when he crosses paths with her. I don't want to say too much more about the plot because I don't want to spoil it for anyone.

In my opinion The Lucky One is a well-written and interesting novel that kept my interest throughout. The main characters are interesting and kind enough for the reader (or at least me) to feel empathy. Like all Sparks books, this one is loaded with lots of description that makes it easy to envision the town, house, kennel, etc.

The actual story itself is a bit predictable. I had the ending worked out about half-way through the book. I was happy to see that my version was a bit off so there still was a bit of surprise for me at the end. The Lucky One is no "Notebook" or "Message in a Bottle", but it is certainly better than the latest batch of Sparks novels. I'd recommend it to fans of Nicholas Sparks and to those who are looking for a fast and easy read.

In my opinion The Lucky One doesn't compare to Nicholas Sparks' very best novels, but it is certainly a huge improvement over the lacking stories that he's been publishing these past few years. Sparks is headed in the right direction and I can only hope that his next book is even better than this one. It is deffiently a book i will be passing along to my sister and friends.

For me this book gets a 4/5