Final Review

Nicholas Sparks is known for his well voiced romance novels with a tragic twist at the end and The Lucky One is no exception. When a person is tossed into a lethal warzone, everything is thrown into a deadly tailspin with people dying all around. It would be easy to be taken under if you don’t have anything to hold onto. For Logan Thibault, the thing keeping him grounded and safe from the horrors of war was a torn photograph of a mysterious women. Upon his discharge from the military Thibault embarks in a cross country journey to find the women in the photograph. When he finds her, Thibault finds himself falling in love, that is, until secrets, a mysterious past, and a jealous ex threatens to tear them apart. This is the premise that Nicholas Spark’s latest romance novel The Lucky One is built on.

The Lucky One is a chocolate chip cookie of a book, it’s comfortable and homey, something to be enjoyed, but at the end of the day it’s unremarkable and something we’ve all experienced. There’s no arguing the fact that Sparks writes with excellent voice. It’s something that’s present in The Lucky One as it is in all of his novels. The voice, the writing style, is what makes this book such a readable one but at some points Sparks relies too heavily on that voice, using over flourished style to hide the lack of original plot and characters. The plot is the chocolate chips on the cookie; it’s the one thing that you can find consistently in every recipe. Sparks chocolate chips could be interchanged with any number of romance plots and the story would still remain unchanged for the most part. A man looks for a women not knowing what he wants, falls in love with her, and a hidden past threatens to pull them apart; but don’t fret, because love prevails in the end. As if we all didn’t see that one coming. It’s as predictable as chocolate chips in a cookie.

If the plot is chocolate chips, then the characters could only be compared to the baking time. No matter how great your recipe is, if you mess up the cooking time you’re either going to end up with an under baked mushy mess (underdeveloped and fickle characters), or an equally unappealing burnt and crunchy monstrosity (over concentrated unchanging characters). In the case of Sparks, his cookies are burnt to a crisp. Every character encountered in this novel is totally one dimensional. They are all static. There is no change that takes place in any of them, and if there is, it’s so miniscule that it goes unnoticed. In fact, the biggest change that takes place is in the minor part played by the dog in the story. His loyalties slightly shift by the end of the story from his owner to a child who needs him. The protagonist is immediately liked from the beginning and the reader’s opinion of him doesn’t waiver for a second throughout the novel. There’s no reason for it to because Sparks only paints him in the shining light of a struggling hero. There is not one bad decision or dark shadow clouding this character or giving him any dimension. The same is true for the antagonist of the story. From the very start he is depicted as a heartless creep who doesn’t care about anything but what’s in his own best interest and this holds true through the end. Never is there a point where you think this man may have some redeeming quality, if only you give it a chance. He is villain through and through. This lack of dimension is seen over and over again in the novel making it predictable and burnt past salvation. And we all know there’s nothing worse than a burnt cookie.

Though this may sound like a never ending rant, there are things I believe Sparks does well. After all, no chocolate chip cookie can be all bad, right? This is where the homey feeling comes in. The reason you can’t put this book down despite all of its failings, is your desperate hope for a good ending. The struggling burnt hero I mentioned before? Well you can’t help but falling in love with him. You find yourself rooting for him because just once you want the good guy to win. Thibault fights for what’s good and constantly tries to do the right thing despite the cost to him and for that reason, you want him to win. You want to put this book down with the warm fuzzies of knowing that everything worked out, and despite the death at the end of the novel, you do. In fact, the death ties up some lose ends and ensures our hero and his love interest will live happily ever after. Though we see this coming from a hundred pages away, it’s safe and comforting none the less. At the end of the day a cookie is still a cookie.

That being said, this cookie cutter novel gets a 5.5/10 stars. The feel good happy ending is overshadowed by the generic chocolate chips of a plot and crunchy, over baked, characters. This is a typical Spark’s novel and leaves much to be desired when you’re finished. There are certainly worse books out there, but why choke down a burnt and generic cookie when you could have a unique well baked one instead?

Genre v. Literary Fiction

Like most high school students, I prefer genre fiction to literary fiction any day, but that being said, I don’t think genre fiction has a place in the school curriculum the way literary fiction does. Genre fiction is often written much more simply in order to reach a wider audience. They don’t contain concepts that are more difficult to grasp, a higher vocabulary, or the level of symbolism that is seen in literary fiction. To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, is heavy on symbolism which gives several launch points for class discussion. Genre fiction novels simply don’t do this and often dead end in discussion. That, of course goes for most, though not all, genre fiction novels. Hunger Games for example, provides symbolism. In fact, the entire series is based off the symbol of the mockingjay. The problem with the symbolism in these novels is that you’re hit over the head with it. There is no way you could miss the symbol and you’re told point blank what it means and what it stands for at several instances. This requires no outside thinking making it still inadequate for classroom teaching.

I do agree with the argument in Readicide and how our school system is overanalyzing and killing reading for students, but I don’t think we can change the system. How do you justify removing Of Mice and Men or Macbeth from the curriculum? How can you honestly argue that students will be ready for further education without exposure and understanding of those key texts? The fact is, we wouldn’t be. Without sufficient literary background students won’t be ready to further their education and would be harmed in the long run because of it. Even though we won’t always like it and perhaps will always prefer the simpler and more entertaining texts of genre fiction, the analysis of literary fiction is vital to our school development.