Nightmare Tally: The Dark Side of Dreams

There's nothing quite like sinking into a Nicholas Sparks novel.  You know that you're in for a love story about the bond between a salt-of-the-earth guy and a sophisticated-but-sweet girl that breaks your heart as it edges ever so gently into poignance and sometimes darkness.  Yet as I began reading Sparks' latest, Dreamland, I realized that it would be different.  Although it follows the budding romance between Colby, who gave up his dream of being a musician to run the family farm, and Morgan, a spectacular singer intent on achieving stardom in Nashville, there's something else: Beverly and her six-year-old son, Tommie, on the run from her dangerous husband.  

If this scenario sounds familiar, then it's because Sparks' Safe Haven was also about a woman fleeing an abusive spouse.  But in Dreamland, Sparks goes much deeper.  He gives us every visceral detail of Beverly's struggle: the sweat that soaks her disguise in the merciless southern sun as she walks miles to buy what little food she can afford for Tommie, the terror when a cashier comments that she looks familiar, and has she been in the store before?  The risk she takes hitchhiking to Tommie's school to deliver his forgotten lunch.  Her exhaustion from scrubbing the ramshackle house that she rents in the middle of nowhere, no questions asked.  Beverly's anxiety is so palpable it's painful, and as I read, it made me anxious too.

Sparks switches between Colby's and Beverly's stories throughout the novel, finally combining them in a powerful denouement that answers every question.  Although I had an inkling of the twist, the full scope of it, once revealed, was a shocker.  And I thought what I always think when closing a Sparks book: Sparks isn't a master of just love stories, he's a master of life stories, showing us what it means to be human and happy (or not) through his fate-fueled narratives.      

Even if that sometimes means battling nightmares before reaching the peace of dreamland.        

Day One, Fun Run: Sneakers That Ignite a Spark

Sneakers: PUMA, Zulily

Despite this title, I'm not running for charity -- or for any other reason -- this New Year's.  Still, I did get some new sneakers.  I've never been much of an athletic shoe girl, but I must admit that the architecture of the sneaker offers ample surface area for the kind of color and pattern play I enjoy.  Also, I thought that these neon numbers might motivate me to do more than the occasional jumping jacks.  

Not so with Trevor Benson in Nicholas Sparks's latest, The Return.  That's right, I'm segueing from shoes to a book review.  Then again, it's probably not the first time.

Trevor runs six miles a day even though he hates it and passes up most of his French fries because he can imagine his arteries hardening.  Which is to say that he's as tightly wound as any Sparks hero -- even if, in the first few pages, he insists that he's not a hero in that aw-shucks-yet-unreliable-narrator way.  Still, Trevor has good reason to be uptight.  He's an ex-Navy doctor who came home minus an ear and with PTSD.  So, he's literally running from his problems.  The book's called The Return because Trevor's back in New Bern, North Carolina -- the setting of many a Sparks saga -- to fix up his late grandfather's house.  Yet as he refurbishes the old cottage, he discovers that he doesn't know the whole truth about his grandfather.  Lovely but odd cop Natalie Masterson and troubled teen Callie, no last name, are key in helping him solve the mystery.  Both are running from something, too, connecting these three souls in their struggles.

The Return flirts with romantic suspense even more flagrantly than earlier Sparks novels The Guardian, Safe Haven, and, more recently, See Me.  Although sleepier than any of those barn burners, The Return features the most mysterious -- and at times eerie -- of budding romances.  It also includes that less-oft-discussed but nonetheless noteworthy Sparks staple of low-grade stalking, a phenomenon that gives me the creeps even as it makes me laugh (neither, of which, I surmise, is a response that Sparks was going for).  Finally, Sparks-speaking-as-Trevor vacillates between the usual corny and a new hint of jaded, but then divorce (Sparks's, not Trevor's) will do that to you.  Snarkiness aside, I liked The Return.  Sparks is a classic storyteller.  The way he describes idyllic yet haunting small towns and weaves past and present to show true love delivers.   

That said, let's take a brief break to look at my second pair of new sneakers.  They were a Christmas gift from my sister, and the reason that they're popping up now is because they're called The Fuzz, and love interest Natalie is Johnny (Janey?) Law.

Sneakers: Katy Perry, Amazon

As usual, this sneaker sidebar is my way of making light of something serious -- even if the something serious in this case is fiction -- something, ironically, that Trevor's therapist says he does, too.  But humor -- and funky footwear -- make life's icky stuff easier.  And The Return is crammed with icky stuff, making good on its promise of Sparks's signature sadness.  As for the ending, about half of Sparks's books end happily, a gamble that keeps readers coming back to find out if they'll need that economy-sized box of tissues or if they can save it for This is Us.  I won't spoil the ending of this one, though.  Consider it my New Year's gift to you.

On that note, this year, more reading, less running.  Even if reading is just running in place.

Movie Moment: Safe Haven

Few havens feed a hungry heart as well as a house made of candy.  Although perhaps better suited to a movie like Hansel and Gretel, this gumdrop of a graphic struck the right note with me in terms of introducing Safe Haven.  Based on the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name, this Valentine's Day weekend box office darling held no surprises for me.  Fortunately, the familiarity only deepened its charm.

Katie (Julianne Hough) is running from something.  Saddled with a backstory that is perhaps darker than any other in the Sparks canon, her shadowed past serves as the ideal foil for sleepy Southport, the North Carolina beach hamlet where she takes refuge.  Katie sets tentative roots by renting a cottage, waitressing at the local cafe, and becoming a regular at the general store.  A quaint, near-ramshackle of a place that sells light groceries (and on a good day) paint, it's run by Alex, a widowed father of the hunky, aw-shucks variety whose flirting style is as awkward as Katie's is avoidant.  The fledgling courtship that flowers between them is made even more fragile by Katie's secret.  Idyllic walks and beach scenes continue to be undercut by Katie's flashbacks of her old life in Boston.  Everything about the city is dark, right down to Katie's clothes and hair, serving as a contrast to the breezily bright and beachy Southport where she begins a new chapter.  What lies in the balance is a classic tale of fate and true love.  Hardly groundbreaking stuff, as Sparks-slaying critics are happy to say.  But it's this homespun simplicity that makes Safe Haven so universally poignant and so human.

Indeed, it's a cold customer who doesn't eke out a tear at the end.

Book Report: Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks

Every Christmas the bf buys me the new hardcover Nicholas Sparks novel. This year's title was Safe Haven, the cover of which I glimpsed on one of our many Target excursions. "There it is!" I cried, pointing, my voice betraying more excitement than the sighting warranted.

That having been said, I was eager to start reading it when I unwrapped it on Christmas Eve and did so as soon as I finished Marley & Me. Maybe this would be a good place to shout SPOILER ALERT! because, as in all my book and movie reviews, I can't be stopped from giving away the ending. So, if you don't want to know, then stop reading now and come back later (if you want to). Maybe I should start putting SPOILER ALERT in all these posts . . .

But on to the discussion.

Not too far into the story, I realized that this book was . . . different. Although it had all the hallmarks of a Nicholas Sparks tearjerker - two single, salt-of-the-earth people, an aura of sadness, and a safe, sleepy North Carolina town - it also had a darkness, the shadow of which had surfaced only in one other Sparks novel, The Guardian. In that story, the darkness stems from a stalker, but in Safe Haven, Sparks takes that idea a little further, casting his heroine, Katie, as a woman on the run from her abusive husband (Kevin).

In many ways, this story is the stuff of Lifetime movies. You know, damaged woman flees violent man, eventually seeking refuge in the arms of kind man. But Katie's flashbacks are more spine-tingling than anything from a movie. As I read, I tried to imagine being married to a man who not only forbid me to drive, have a job, and make friends, but who decided how I dressed, ordered me to cook and clean like a servant - and beat me. The idea was terrifying and was made even more so by the glimpses Sparks offers of the inner workings of Kevin's head.

As you might expect, Katie's escape is chilling. She changes her appearance and her name, crashing in seedy flophouses and changing waitressing jobs every week, fleeing city after city until finally landing in Mayberryesque Southport, North Carolina. There she takes yet another waitressing job and rents a dismal cottage that she slowly but surely begins to refurbish. Her only friend is Jo, a grief counselor who lives in the neighboring cottage. At least she's Katie's only friend until Katie forges a fledgling relationship with Alex, the widower who owns the general store where she frugally shops for rice and beans. This in itself is a quaint notion, the tired young widower raising two small children and managing a general store (complete with lunch counter!) in a world taken over by Walmarts getting to know the quiet, beautiful woman who walks there (she doesn't have a driver's license, not to mention a car), trying in vain to shut the world out.

As per usual, Sparks spends his time describing Alex's wife and the brain tumor that took her life. She's been gone about a year, and Alex hasn't dated anyone since. These sorts of scenarios used to give me lots of trouble when I was younger. I would think, if there's just one person for everyone, and that person dies, then how can the person left behind end up falling in love with someone else? Sometimes the dead spouses in such tales were portrayed as giving their husbands or wives their blessing, outraging me even further. I've softened a bit since then and like to think that I would want the bf to find someone new should anything happen to me. Nevertheless, reading about stuff like this still leaves me feeling a little unsettled.

Alex and Katie's relationship blossoms tentatively. She's a natural with his children, and he appreciates what she's going through because he used to work with battered women as a detective in the army. (As corny as it sounds, I enjoy reading about good people finding love. But then, so must lots of other women, judging from the success of Sparks's novels.) Alex wants to marry Katie, but she reminds him that she's already married, even if under a different name. To be sure, even as she falls in love and begins to feel safe, Sparks reminds us that Kevin, drunker and more unbalanced than ever, is still out there looking for her.

As the story winds down to its inevitable conclusion, Alex asks Katie to watch the kids at night while he picks up a friend at the airport. When he leaves, it's one of those nail-biting moments, kind of like when you're watching a horror movie, willing someone not to open a door. Hours pass before anything happens, but Katie is eventually awakened by smoke and realizes that the house is on fire. What follows is a chaotic episode rife with near-death experiences. The short version is that Alex comes home in time to save Katie and the kids, but not before she gives Kevin an ass-whupping. The only casualties are Kevin (I think his death is self-inflicted if not intentional) and Alex's store. Yet the fireproof safe that Alex kept in his bedroom remains unscathed. In it is a sealed letter from Alex's wife to Katie (or, as she puts it, to the woman he chooses).

This is where things get a little weird. Katie's about to open the letter, alone at her house, when she notices that Jo's house is completely deserted and ramshackle-looking, as if no one has lived there in years. Before Katie even opens the letter she begins to think about her times with Jo. About how Jo asked her not to mention their friendship to Alex because she'd been Alex's grief counselor when his wife died, about how Jo had urged her to give Alex a chance, and finally, about Jo's untouched wine glass the one time they'd met for drinks. In a burst of The Sixth Sense-like clarity, Katie (and I) realized the obvious -- that Jo was the ghost of Alex's wife. I was embarrassed not to have seen it coming. I had known there was something off about Jo but had chalked it up to her being one of those nosy, buttinsky friend characters. I was also a little creeped out. But then, it was two o' clock in the morning, and I've been known to get creeped out easily.

Jo's letter to Katie is every bit as heartrending as you'd expect it to be. Sparks pulls out all the stops with his signature story-telling device - the letter. (On the back cover of this book he's even photographed poised over a notebook.) It adds a whole new dimension to the kind of love triangle between spouse, deceased spouse, and new lover that I described earlier. Knowing that Jo helped to engineer Alex and Katie's relationship makes the ending even more bittersweet. If you can read the letter (not to mention the book) without crying, then you're a stronger woman than me.