From the back cover:
Class of ’59 high school senior Landon Carter spends his time trying to stay out of trouble in the small town of Beaufort, North Carolina. The last person he’d ever fall for is quiet Jamie Sullivan, the Baptist minister’s daughter. But when he waits too long to get a date for the homecoming dance, she’s the only one left to ask. While his friends make jokes about the unlikely couple, he decides this will be their first and last date.

But Jamie has a way of shaking up his plans, and Landon’s life goes down a path he never dreamed possible.

Review:
This was my first book by Nicholas Sparks, and it will be my last. I was rolling my eyes so strenuously on page xi of the Prologue that I thought I was going to hurt something. Things were a bit better once the story got underway, but I never laughed or cried, as the Prologue informed me that I would. Yes, Jamie has a secret. And yes, it’s completely obvious within the first fifty pages. Was I supposed to be stunned by the big reveal later on?

Mostly, this is the tale of TypicalTeen and how he is ashamed to be seen publicly with ReligiousGirl until ReligiousGirl appears in a play with her hair down and TypicalTeen suddenly realizes that she’s pretty and that he’s in love with her. ReligiousGirl carries her Bible everywhere, saves wounded animals, volunteers with orphans, never has a harsh word for anyone, and is unbelievably socially obtuse. TypicalTeen engages in such behavior as slacking in class, hanging out at the diner with the stereotypes he’s been given for friends, eating boiled peanuts in graveyards, and experiencing guilt for all the times he mocked ReligiousGirl and her father. This was all bland and cardboard, and utterly failed to elicit any emotion from me at all.

The laughably bad bits, however, are when TypicalTeen and ReligiousGirl start reading the Bible together. It is not at all my intent to mock religion; I simply take exception with the writing here. These passages gave off the vibe of someone writing about something they don’t know. It’s like someone saying, “And we sat together and watched a lot of Star Trek. And sometimes when we were watching Star Trek we would ask each other what we thought about that episode of Star Trek and what Star Trek really meant.” Dude couldn’t do any research?

To make this all worse, the narrator on the audiobook (Frank Muller) read in the most pretentious way imaginable. The final word of every sentence was elongated and very nearly whispered. It was so bad I had to play it for my cubicle mate so we could mock it.

Concluding on a completely random note, A Walk to Remember mentions hush puppies no fewer than three times. Thanks for sticking me with a craving, CrappyWriter.

From the back of the book:
In the first chapter of this haunting novel, 14-year-old Susie Salmon looks down from heaven and describes the horrifying events of her murder. As time goes on, Susie continues her curious observations while her family struggles to cope with the pain of her death. Her younger sister grows tougher and more mature, her mother goes to desperate lengths to ease the suffering, and her father begins a perilous quest to bring the killer to justice.

Review:
This book starts out absolutely stunningly. Susie’s murder and the aftermath progress evenly and fascinatingly for about a year after her death. After that time, however, events speed up and soon whole years are glossed over within a sentence. It became a real “Drop in on X and see where they are now. Okay, next character!” cycle. And it isn’t that these little snapshots weren’t interesting; it just really felt rushed.

Thankfully, this doesn’t last too very long before the story wraps up in a more linear fashion. The ending may be a bit too tidy for some, I suppose, but I loved it. The author manages to be thoughtful and evoke imagery without being pretentious or writing so densely as to require strong effort to decode for meaning.

The Lovely Bones is unique, a trifle flawed, but wholly unforgettable. I’ll remember this story for a long time.

From the back cover:
Roland Michell, a young academic assistant, has devoted his life to studying the life and works of 19th century writer Randolph Henry Ash. One day in the library, Roland opens a dusty volume and finds a provocative letter written by Ash to an unnamed woman. From that moment, Roland begins a quest for information about this mysterious person. His search will take him into the domain of Dr. Maud Bailey, a beautiful, keenly intelligent, and fiercely independent scholar. What they will discover is an unusual and unconventional love story that echoes through their own lives.

Review:
I am not a poetry fan. I only like it if I can understand it with minimal interpretation, if it doesn’t hinge on some allusion or symbolism that is absolutely impenetrable to me. There is an awful lot of poetry in Possession, and also writing about poetry, and about the way a poet sees the world. The correspondence between Ash and his unnamed woman is full of such references, and the fact that the two of them could understand and share these conversations is why they formed their special bond. Alas, the reader is somewhat alienated here. I recognize that these things made sense to and were relevant to them but I didn’t always fully fathom what they were getting at, and that was frustrating. Most of the included poems, however, are quite accessible and I found that I liked them a great deal more than I would have expected, particularly “Swammerdam,” which is about this guy.

The rest of the tale, the modern scholars who are trying to uncover what happened, their scholarly competition who are sniffing about trying to find out what Roland has discovered, and the actual interaction between Ash and the poetess, is in plain prose narrative, and unravels as quite the mystery, almost a kind of literary chase at the end. Throughout the book, modern scholars discover further letters, journals, etc., and not everyone has access to what the others have found. I liked most of these, but towards the end I was getting a little weary. “Okay, here’s some really long excerpt from a book by some supposed spiritual medium ranting about how Ash once exposed the trickery of her seance. Does it have to be six pages long?!”

Still, the sense of going from clue to clue, random small discovery leading to big information that clarifies what was unclear before, is a lot of fun. The deftness with which this is all handled, and the subtlety of some evolutions of relationships, makes this a satisfying, thoughtful, and surprisingly easy read. Highly recommended.