Product Description

"Somewhere," muses Noah Calhoun, while sitting on his porch in the moonight, "there were people making love." The Notebook, a Southern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves around a single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful Allison Nelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to be engaged), or will she choose Noah, the romantic rascal she left so many years ago?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #853 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 239 pages

Amazon.com
"Somewhere," muses Noah Calhoun, while sitting on his porch in the moonight, "there were people making love." The Notebook, a Southern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves around a single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful Allison Nelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to be engaged), or will she choose Noah, the romantic rascal she left so many years ago?

From Publishers Weekly
In 1932, two North Carolina teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks fall in love. Spending one idyllic summer together in the small town of New Bern, Noah Calhoun and Allie Nelson do not meet again for 14 years. Noah has returned from WWII to restore the house of his dreams, having inherited a large sum of money. Allie, programmed by family and the "caste system of the South" to marry an ambitious, prosperous man, has become engaged to powerful attorney Lon Hammond. When she reads a newspaper story about Noah's restoration project, she shows up on his porch step, re-entering his life for two days. Will Allie leave Lon for Noah? The book's slim dimensions and cliche-ridden prose will make comparisons to The Bridges of Madison County inevitable. What renders Sparks's (Wokini: A Lakota Journey of Happiness and Self-Understanding) sentimental story somewhat distinctive are two chapters, which take place in a nursing home in the '90s, that frame the central story. The first sets the stage for the reading of the eponymous notebook, while the later one takes the characters into the land beyond happily ever after, a future rarely examined in books of this nature. Early on, Noah claims that theirs may be either a tragedy or a love story, depending on the perspective. Ultimately, the judgment is up to readers?be they cynics or romantics. For the latter, this will be a weeper. Major ad/promo; first serial to Good Housekeeping; movie rights to New Line Cinema; Warner Audio; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Here is a first novel that many people are banking on: the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club are featuring it as a main selection and film, foreign, and serial rights are already sold. At 80, Noah Calhoun reads daily from a notebook containing the love story of Noah and Allie. We learn of the teenaged lovers, their 14-year separation and reunion in New Bern, North Carolina, just weeks before Allie is to marry another man. Back in the present, we learn that Noah and Allie did marry and were happy for more than 40 years. Now, they are residents of a nursing home, separated both by rooms and, more profoundly, by Allie's Alzheimer's. Noah's daily reading from the notebook is not to himself; he reads aloud to Allie, hoping that the power of their love story will reach her. Noah's coping mechanisms as an old man are exceptional, and the novel's format, focusing just on the dual beginnings of their love story and its denouement, is intriguing. This is a more romantic testament to love's enduring miracle than Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County (LJ 3/1/92) because the Calhouns chose the rigors of daily domestic life over a dream of four days. For all popular collections.
-?Rebecca S. Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The Notebook
Nicholas Sparks is one of the few writers that make you stop and savour his words, his sentences....He is an amazing writer that grabs you from the very beginning. The Notebook is one of those books that you can read over and over again...It is a classic and a must have in your book shelf. JUST AMAZING!!!

Difficult emotionally
I read the book before seeing the movie. My daughter had advised me not to attend the movie in the theater, but to wait til it was on DVD because she felt it would be too emotional for me. Though the story is a bit thin at places and the characters are sometimes a bit cliche, I still loved the book and the movie. I cried through both of them because my mother died with Alzheimer's Disease. My father was a devoted caregiver to her throughout her illness. For someone trying to cope with the effects of this disease on the family, this movie can be very moving. It reminds you of what you have lost, but it also stirs up those happy memories from the past.

Memorable
The book The Notebook was very good. it had a very good message to it which was to listen to your heart. When you are stuck in a situation that needs solving, you listen to your heart and do what you think is best. When Allie went and visited Noah, and became close to him, she didn't know what to say to her husband, Lon, about it.