Usually I tend to read books before I watch their movies, but with A Walk to Remember, I didn’t want to read the book or watch the movie. My first impression of it was that it was incredibly cheesy, and I walked out of the theatre about 10 minutes into it. Later, it came on TV and I thought, “What the hell?” I watched the whole thing, and I’m not embarrassed to say that I really loved it. Yes, it was cheesy, but it was the good kind of cheesy. But I’m not here to talk about the movie. Out of curiousity, I recently picked up the book to see if it was as good as the movie. I was not disappointed, but I also found that it was rather different. Here’s my review.
A Walk to Remember tells the story of Landon Cartor, a high school senior living in North Carolina in the year 1958. Landon is a regular teenager; he doesn’t like school or its activities very much and spends his days hanging out with his friends at Cecil’s Diner and occasionally the graveyard, and his days are almost eventless. At the beginning of the story, Landon introduces us (from a first person perspective) to two important characters – Hegbert Sullivan and his daughter Jamie. Hegbert is a minister “who’d been with the church since Moses parted the Red Sea”, as Landon put it. He is quite religious, and so is his daughter, and this is made obvious by the bible she carries around wherever she goes. Landon has learned to keep his distance from them since childhood, especially since he’s stopped attending Hegbert’s sermons a while ago.
By a twist of fate, Landon and Jamie are brought together by the school play, The Christmas Angel, which Hegbert had written as an adaptation of The Christmas Carol. Jamie and Landon end up getting the main roles, and that causes them to hang out with each other more and more, allowing to Landon to find out all about Jamie, and eventually realise underneath all the goody two shoes exterior, she is a normal girl with different interests, but it is only on the opening day of the play that he realises that he’s falling for her. When they first started hanging out, Jamie asked him to promise her never to love in her, but by that time, Landon realises that it was impossible for him to keep his promise, and he eventually expresses his feelings for her, which leads to an innocent courtship between the two.
It’s not all sunshine and roses, of course, for Jamie’s father dislikes him and often makes it difficult for them to really get to know each other, at times even looking displeased with their relationship. It is only until a few weeks later that Landon discovers the reason behind that, and behind the promise Jamie made him made. It’s impossible to mention the reason here without ruining the story, but I’ll say this: if you watched the movie and cried (as I did) then you’ll probably cry when reading this book (as I did, too).
This book tells an incredibly sweet, heart-warming story that will linger in your mind for quite a while, and even though the book was a bit different from the movie, whether in terms of the description of some characters, or the events which were in the book but weren’t in the movie (and vice versa), I didn’t have any complaints. Nicholas Sparks delivered the story quite nicely and I was able to picture it in my head all throughout. The tone of the book was powerful and moving. There aren’t many books that make me cry, I can count them on the fingers of one hand, but A Walk to Remember was definitely one of them. Even if you hadn’t watched the movie, I would most definitely recommend this book to you.
My rating? 4/5
