If you’ve read Nicholas Sparks before you’ll know he has a kind of ‘recipe’ for his books. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, there’s some drama and then everything miraculously works out okay in the end. It should be predictable, but he has a way of writing that pulls you in and you become so gripped in the story that you don’t care that you know what’s probably going to happen.

This book starts off with a woman called Denise who gets involved in a car accident, and it’s fireman Taylor that helps her out of the car. Her son has gone missing from the back of the car and Taylor ends up being the guy on the search party that finds him – what a hero…

So, you can tell straight away what’s going to happen. Turns out though that Taylor has issues from his past that he won’t talk about, but that scare him off whenever anything gets serious, so obviously there’s a fight and Taylor and Denise end up breaking up.

That is, until Taylor’s best friend Mitch is killed in a fire before Taylor can pull him out and when Taylor needs someone to talk to, he turns to Denise. Eventually he opens up to her and what-do-you-know, everything turns out just fine.

It was a typical chick-lit book, but Nicholas Sparks does them the best, and it was a thoroughly good read. I can definitely tell why so many of Sparks’ books have been made into films.