Reading hasn’t always been my thing growing up. I knew I always liked the genre of Romance in anything from movies, tv shows, and music. Written with excitement and romance, The Notebook written by Nicholas Sparks made me fall in love with reading all over again. The author's way of not just making this a romance novel is impeccable. It’s not your average cheesy, cringy romance book, it’s so much more. There is excitement, there’s sadness, and there is hope. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to feel something when they read. 

The book starts out with an old man telling a story to a woman in a nursing home. The story is about a boy named Noah and a girl named Allie. Whom they shared a brief yet passionate summer together. Soon after they were separated by class. Allie came from a wealthy family, and Noah worked in a lumber yard. Noah wrote 365 letters to Allie after they were separated, and somehow Allie never got the letters. 

The old man in The Notebook was the narrator for part of this book. It was a first-person point of view throughout the book. The narrator switches between the old man to Noah in the story. It is executed seamlessly throughout the book when the narrators switch. Although it ends up being the same character, in the end, Noah in the story is the old man in real life, and Nicholas Sparks wrote it perfectly. 

In my opinion, the theme of the book is to follow your heart. In the book, there was a very specific moment where there was a difficult decision to be made. Allie had a fiance at the time and she had run into (wink) Noah after being separated for 14 years. She had to make a choice of which one she wanted to be with, in the end. Now, I am not going to spoil the ending but she did follow her heart. It is a very common theme in life as we know it. When facing a tough decision I believe that following your heart is the best option because your heart knows what it wants. Again, Allie and Noah face many challenges and decisions that make them question whether to follow their heart or not. 

The notebook in the book is the most important symbol I have seen. I mean it makes up the entire title, which most books do, and it is a huge symbol of Allie and Noah’s love. In the book, the old man is reading a book to an old woman in the nursing home. Later in the book, you find out that the book that is being read was actually written by Allie to help the old woman remember Noah after being diagnosed with dementia. The notebook is the entire story of how their love came to be. 

The way this book made me feel is more than I’ve ever felt in any relationship. I cried for 4 days after reading this book just wanting to be in love. The love and connection between Noah and Allie are indescribable, even if it was for just 1 short summer. Even though it was described as the couple to have fought all the time, their love healed all.