The Best of Me

Nicholas Sparks is the author of 23 bestselling romance novels and two works of fiction. His first novel, The Notebook, published in 1996, was an instant success and was later remade into a cult romance movie by the same name. Through his works of fiction, Sparks explores various facets of romantic love: Love that lasts a lifetime and beyond is explored in novels such as A Message in a Bottle (1998) and The Guardian (2003); the reunion of separated lovers in The Notebook; the difficult choices that lovers face in Nights in Rodanthe (2002); and the agony of unfulfilled love in Dear John (2006). In his repertoire of romance novels, Sparks contemplates the power of true love to inspire people as well as transcend the limitations of time and space. The Best of Me (2010) focuses on elements such as nostalgia, memories, separation, the past, and sacrifice, which are recurring themes in many of Sparks’s novels.

Passionate love that leads to a lifetime of memories, pain, and nostalgia is a staple in Sparks novels and is the major plot point of The Best of Me. Similarly, the ability of love to transcend death and the love of older couples as an inspiration to the young are some of the themes common in Sparks’s novels that are also found in this text. Flashback and the use of letters to communicate memories associated with romance are important techniques that appear in The Best of Me, making this a classic Nicholas Sparks romance. The roles of chance and destiny and elements of the supernatural round out the metaphysical themes in The Best of Me. Like Sparks’s other novels, The Best of Me takes place in a small town in North Carolina, the author’s home state. A social theme Sparks often investigates in this setting is the adverse effects of small-town traditions on unconventional love. The idyllic natural beauty of small-town America stands in contrast to the backwardness of old-world social morality that characters from that world exhibit. In this case, tension arises over the protagonists’ different social classes, and both families disapprove of their relationship.

Sparks’s novels have other constant features that both conform to and depart from conventional romance novel tropes. The traditional aspects of his stories include having two main protagonists. American romance novels are overwhelmingly heteronormative, and Sparks’s novels are no exception. There is always a hurdle the would-be couple must overcome to make their love a reality. In this case, when Amanda and Dawson were young, the hurdle was their families’ disapproval. When they meet again as adults, the hurdles are Amanda’s marriage and Dawson’s guilty conscience. It is important to note that while the couple is young, the barriers to their relationship are from external forces, but when they are adults, the barriers arise from the choices they have made in their adult lives. In this way, Sparks nuances the typical star-crossed lovers story by making the characters themselves responsible for whether or not they can be together.