"Love is the essence of a full and wonderful life."

This is the crux of the moving and poignant tale of Adrienne and Paul in "Nights in Rodanthe" who find love late in their lives during a long weekend in Rodanthe.

'She had fallen in love with a stranger in the course of a weekend..'

Adrienne is forty five and mother of three. Her husband left her for a younger woman and ever since life has not been the same for her. Though she smiles and diligently looks after her children, she is not happy and has lost her confidence and enthusiasm.

Paul, on the other hand, is a fifty four year old famous surgeon who sells his well-established practice, his house and practically everything he owns after his wife divorces him and his son wants to keep no relation with him.

Both Paul and Adrienne meet at an Inn in Rodanthe where Adrienne is substituting for her friend and Paul is a guest. As the storm approaches and they are secluded from the world, these two lost and damaged souls find solace in each other’s company

'..though he had met her only the day before, he sensed that somehow she already knew him better than most people did.
Or maybe, he thought, better than anyone.'

eventually falling in love.

'All he knew for sure was that he was beginning to fall for a woman named Adrienne, who was watching the Inn for a friend in a tiny coastal town in North Carolina.'

But there are some things that Paul needs to do before they can live together forever and leaves Adrienne with the promise of meeting her on Christmas in a year's time.

Will there love stand the test of time?
Will Paul return to Adrienne?
Will they have their happily ever after?

Nicholas Sparks weaves magic in this book. There is drama, heartfelt feelings that tug at your heartstrings and leave you with myriad of emotions. I was able to feel myself as one with both Adrienne and Paul and could feel all their sorrows, regrets, happiness, joy and finally their acceptance of their lives.

I felt my heart breaking, felt it beat faster in anticipation and skip a beat all in the course of the story. I cried and felt angry at the injustice of life and also laughed and wiped happy tears from my eyes feeling a sense of contentment. Sparks knows how to put emotions from the farthest corners of our heart into potent words where each word creates a dynamic picture. His books are not just stories but lessons to be learnt showing his deep understanding of human nature and life as a whole.

He uses some very creative comparisons to bring more color to his descriptions of the surroundings like
‘There was a deep haze over the water, and the skies were gunmetal gray. Cumulus clouds raced along, rolling parallel with the shore.’, ‘Tendrils of mist lingered in dawn and moved in ghostly procession from one small home to the next.’, ‘A long, streaking lightning bolt connected sea to sky, and thunder echoed as if two cars had collided on the highway. The wind gusted, bending the limbs of trees in a single direction. Rain blew sideways, as if trying to defy gravity.’

Similarly the character sketches are very impressive and Sparks has succeeded in creating an image of the character in the minds of the reader like the character sketch of Robert Torrelson whose wife dies after the surgery done by Paul and who blames Paul for her death.

‘Robert Torrelson was sixty-seven but looked ten years older. His face was weathered and stained, and his body was slowly losing the battle with time. There was a scar that ran from his left eye to his ear. His hands ached with arthritis, and the ring finger on his right hand was missing from the time he’d got it caught in a winch while dragging in the nets.
But Jill hadn’t cared about any of those things.’

Like all Sparks' books, this is also expertly planned and executed. The characters are ordinary people who face the normal emotions faced by each one of us at one or the other time but still there story is special!
Though the events are basic and maybe we all connect with them but still they are unique in their own way. An ordinary and predictable story made extraordinary and special!!
This is the power in the writing of Nicholas Sparks. :)

A touching story of second chances, of love found and lost, and a story with memorable characters. This is a perfect getaway from our daily problems into a world filled with love and sincere emotions!!

A perfect 5 on 5 for "Nights in Rodanthe" and a strong recommendation not to miss it.
My suggestion to everyone, "Put on your buying gloves and go buy this book. Its not to be skipped." :)

"While I sleep, I dream of you, and when I wake, I long to hold you in my arms. If anything, our time apart has only made me more certain that I want to spend my nights by your side, and my days with your heart."

PS: This review is also available on my blog njkinny.blogspot.in
Do checkout the blog for other reviews.

It's not a typical young adult romance. It's about a sudden, unexpected romance between two middle-aged people. Both of their life suddenly collapsed, both are divorced and alone. They met and fall in love. Adrienne who hides her past romance until her daughter being devastated after her husband's death. As she reveals the sudden romance she had with Paul, she made her daughter understand how life still goes on without the certain someone. Their short time romance made Adrienne strong. A reminder this book will leave you in tears. It's a depressing love story. It involves the loss of loved ones.

I remember purchasing this author!s books from eBay when my kids were small. Not sure why I didn’t use the library.

This is another of his novels where I remember the movie only, but that’s ok as I loved both. I’d love to read hm again soon, just like I’ve rediscovered Danielle Steel after a long time between drinks. I may even loom for him on the audio format. That’s the being the book obsessed gal that I am, I do have some here on my shelves.

I love going on the hunt. And my books have been a gift from God during crazy Covid.

I even found myself browsing Netflix using this author’s name only last night.

Opening line: "Three years earlier, on a warm November morning Adrienne Willis had returned to the Inn and at first glance had thought it unchanged, as if the small inn were impervious to the sun and sand and salted mist."

Even in a book that's only 222 pages long Nicholas Sparks manages to weave his magic. Building a level of suspense as we await breathless to learn of Paul's fate. Reminisent of The Bridges of Madison County this is a quick, easy read but a great story nontheless.

The story begins with Adrienne telling her widowed daughter the tale of her brief love affair fourteen years earlier with a surgeon named Paul. We then alternate between Paul and Adrienne's points of view as we learn the story of their lives and what brought them each to divorce before they found themselves at the inn in Rodanthe.

With a violent storm brewing our protagonists share a walk on the beach and two meals together then fall hopelessly in love. (This did feel a little rushed to me but whatever it's Nicholas Sparks we all know where he's going) After five blissful days together Paul leaves Rodanthe to join his son at the medical clinic in Ecuador. Promising to return to Adrienne at Christmas so they can have their HEA but...well it's Nicholas Sparks isn't it.

This is a quick, smooth read with well developed characters and the typical tugging of the heartstrings we have all come to expect from Sparks. Cheers

“The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when it’s over those two elements always go together”

Liked this one - a good love story and BRAVO - a main character over the age of 40, heck even 30 and a LOVE story. It's about time!

This book left me feeling conflicted. A few years ago I probably would have loved this book and given it 5 stars. I used to be such a sap for anything (which explained my love of twilight) but now I'm more sensible.

I'll start with the positive things about this book. First of all, I liked the books message. Adrienne wanted her daughter to understand that even though she was grieving the loss of her husband, she had responsibilities to look after her children. My dad died when I was 15 and my mother was a lot like Amanda in respect to how she dealt with it. I really felt for Amanda and I was happy that Adrienne's story really got through to her. I also liked Adrienne and I liked how she was conveyed. Everyone thought she was ordinary and it's only after her story that her daughter acknowledged how strong and extraordinary she was. I liked that.

The writing also left me feeling conflicted. I can't decide whether Nicholas Sparks is a brilliant writer or a mediocre one. Maybe he is both. The writing in this novel is very descriptive but the book is so short that it shouldn't have needed it, I thought a lot of it was unnecessary waffle. Sparks would sometimes go off explaining something and I got annoyed because I just wanted him to get to the point.

He always seems to conjure up a story about two people who are missing something from their lives and then when they meet, their lives magically become complete. I don't believe that someone can make your life complete but I suppose if you're missing a person then it's a little more believable. I think a lot of thought goes into how Spark's characters will meet, fit together (too perfectly for it to be entirely believable), fall in love (too quickly in my opinion) and then either live happily ever after or not (his books seem to go both ways). Saying this though, I'm not sure if that's good. It feels too forced and that gives his stories an insta-love vibe most of the time.

There was definitely insta-love in this novel. Like major insta-love. For one they both spent a lot of time describing how beautiful the other one was. We get it, they're perfect. I won't deny the fact they had a connection but again it felt forced. The romantic part of me will ignore that for a minute but I just don't know why Sparks made them love each other like 36 hours into meeting. I think he should have played the strong connection card and then built up the love with the letters and calls but then I suppose they couldn't have "made love". Which brings me to the next thing that annoyed me. Adrienne was talking about how people shouldn't have one night stands or sleep with lots of people (nothing like a bit of slut-shaming!) but then like a page later she was bringing him upstairs to bang him, oh no wait sorry - to "make love". You can't justify that with the excuse of love when it just doesn't seem like love. I think they were both yearning for companionship and those few days in the Inn made them think that what they had was love.

All that said, I enjoyed how it was light and quick. You didn't really need to give this book much thought. I would recommend it to romance readers. This isn't my first Nicholas Sparks book and it probably won't be my last.

INSTA LOVE. This is the definition of insta love, I don’t think the characters knew each other more than 18 hours and they were saying they were in love and didn’t want to be without each other. And the characters are teenagers that I could maybe look past it with, they were in their 40s and 50s. And that’s all the story was just two people who met, said they fell in love, then had to leave each other due to previous commitments. The only thing I liked about the book was the frame story, I would have preferred to read the main characters daughters story about losing her husband. That was really the only interesting thing in the book.

As with most of the novels written by Nicholas Sparks, this was such a beautiful story of love, romance and tragedy.

This story is basically about Adrienne and Paul who meet one weekend. We follow them as we discover more and more of their backstory and following their relationship as they grow closer and closer together.

What I liked the most was that this was not one of those love stories that were based on 20-year old somethings. Adrienne and Paul are in their 40s. They have already lived a life and certainly both have some kind of baggage before they met. Not only are they getting to know each other and getting closer, but they have to learn about each other's pasts as well.

A beautiful story that I just could not put down and would certainly highly recommend!


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Debs :-)

Yet again Nicholas Sparks makes me cry! Even though I could sense what was to come I still shed some tears for the way it is written, beautifully.

It wasn’t as bad as Dear John but still lots of content and a terrible case of instalove

Genre: romance
Age: adult
Series/Standalone: standalone
Content: couple sleeps together before marriage
Rating: 2.5/5 Stars

What I learned from this book is merely a confirmation of something I already know because I have children - most parents willingly and without hesitation make tremendous sacrifices for their children. They will put aside their own wants and needs and sometimes personal happiness so that their children's lives go on uninterrupted and relatively normal. Usually the children are unaware of what they have been given.

An older mother shares with her grieving daughter a yet untold story to help her daughter move on with her life and to be a good mother to her own children after the loss of her husband and their father.

Adrienne shares the story of how as a middle-aged divorcee she meets a man (the only guest - conveniently!) while keeping a seaside inn for her good friend. He is recovering from a divorce and a life lived selfishly and is on his way to make amends with his adult son. They are instantly attracted to one another and a romance begins in the midst of an approaching hurricane. (I just love stormy night stories!)

It is a typial Nicholas Sparks story who is terrific at writing a story that women enjoy. It is also typical in that you may need a tissue near the end of the book. All in all a quick read, a good even if predictable story and a good message all wrapped up in the end. Can't wait to see Diane Lane and Richard Gere in the upcoming movie. Thanks to Donna for recommending and loaning the book.

I was a Nicholas Sparks virgin before I read this book today. I had never read any of his books or seen any of the movies made out of his books. I was attracted to the book because of the setting mainly, the plot was so promising, it could have been so much more than it turned out to be. Unfortunately, the characters were excruciatingly annoying and the plot was so syrupy sweet I felt like I had developed the dreaded Diabeeeeetus as I turned the last page and not just your average run of the mill Type 2 version but the full blown insulin shooting junky Type 1 hardcore version. I sincerely wish that I had remained a Sparks virgin. I must go now and take a shower and my shots.