A Walk To Remember

By Nicholas Sparks

This is a really lovely and beautiful love story, of love that is ever-lasting.

Landon Carter is a rich, handsome and popular with just about everyone at his high school in Beaufort, North Carolina. Jamie Sullivan is a sensitive outcast, misunderstood, unpopular, lonely and shy. Raised by a poor southern Baptist reverend and overlooked by everyone.

When Landon has to decide to take Chemistry or Drama, he signs up for Drama. He ends up with the leading role in the spring play in which Jamie ends up with the female leading role. The Homecoming Dance is getting closer and Landon, just having broken up with his girlfriend, has no date for the dance. An interesting sequence of events causes Landon to ask Jamie to the dance, upon which Jamie tells Landon not to fall in love with her, something he thinks he will have no problem with.

After seeing Jamie on the stage, Landon realises he has fallen head over heels for her. Not long after Jamie reveals that she has leukaemia and is going to die. This news both devastated and scares Landon. He spends as much time with her as he can and they both fall in love with each other. Their love continues to grow as they struggle with their own feelings and the reality of disease.

Jamie tells Landon that she wants to be married before she dies and Landon surprises her by proposing to her, and she accepts. Landon learns what life is really about and even after Jamie’s death; he is still very much in love with her.

Velocity

By Dean Koontz

“If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice is yours.”

This is the note that Billy Wile, a hardworking bartender who leads a quiet, ordinary life in a small California town, finds under his windshield wiper one night after work. Billy takes the note Lanny Olson, a friend on the police force, who advices Billy to go home and forget about it; both deciding it is a sick joke.

Less than twenty-four hours later, a young blond schoolteacher is found murdered and Billy he realises that his indecision has caused a woman to be killed, since he didn’t convince the police to get involved.

The next day he gets a second note with another deadline and another ultimatum. This time giving him even less time to decide his choices. Suddenly Billy’s average, seemingly innocuous life takes on the dimensions and speed of an accelerating nightmare as the notes are coming faster, the deadlines growing tighter and the killer becoming bolder; he even murders a man in Billy’s bathroom as a clueless Billy sits in a rocking chair out on the porch.

Billy’s life takes on nightmarish overtones when he is captured and tortured by the madman. He is told that the death of the final victim will lead him to commit suicide.

The only person who gives his life meaning is his comatose fiancée, Barbara. Several weeks before their marriage, she developed botulism poisoning and has been in a coma for the last four years. Now Billy has the task of making sure that he is not framed for the various murders and the task of keeping Barbara safe. Billy must carefully analyse who might be the psycho murderer and his reasons.

The plot is well thought-out and executed, though the ending is a little far fetched; a very good novel that keeps you on your toes.

Good Wives

By Louisa May Alcott

This is the sequel to Little Women, and much better it was too. In this book we continue to follow the adventures of the four March sisters, and explore the trials and tribulations of entering into womanhood and embarking on married life. The story picks up a few months after Little Women closes and it deals with the expectations that women had to live up to, and how they were supposed to behave, in mid-nineteen century New England.