“The Lucky One” by Nicholas Sparks – Seeping Secrets

Let's face it, most pictures of people we don't know, even if taken professionally, have only the briefest of effects on us, being generally unmemorable, partly due to our inability to relate with them.

However, there are some photographs which cannot fall into the category of the forgettable; there are some pictures where the depicted people end up touching us inexplicably.

It is not unheard of for people to be drawn to complete strangers based on nothing more than their photographs and undertaking journeys to find them.

The premise of The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks is rather similar. It tells the story of a U.S. Marine, Logan Thibault, whose luck can't seem to run out after his discovery of a photograph depicting a smiling young woman buried in the sand. Upon returning home, he cannot push the woman out of his mind despite his best efforts, and decides to set out on a journey to find her.

However,soon enough his grand adventure turns into a quest for love as his path crosses that of Elizabeth, a divorced mother. They soon find themselves in a love affair... though Logan's motives for this journey and what line of thinking really led him to his destination remain unknown to her. Slowly, the secret starts to seep through, threatening to sever their love for each other.

My first instinct was that this was going to be a somewhat cheesy love novel, the name appended to it, that of Sparks, made me more than confident that there would be much more to it than that... and unsurprisingly, that impression was rather correct.

The way I saw it, it is a novel principally about three main plotlines: the search for the mysterious woman in the photograph, the journey Logan undertakes into his own mind and consciousness, and his love affair with Elizabeth. The first one feels like a lighter-hearted mystery (at least in comparison to most mysteries, which are murders these days).

However, when Elizabeth is found, it still remains a mystery in a sense, with Logan searching for the woman he sees in the picture inside the woman he sees in real life.

In the second one we are taken into Logan's various dilemmas, reasonings, and attempts to explain the inexplicable. The third one is a study of how the combination of passionate love and threatening secrets can end up bringing far more pain and destruction than pleasure.

As you can guess, there is certainly more than enough food for thought to be found in here, with it basically being based on character rather than the driving of a plot. However, the novel certainly doesn't lack in entertainment in the slightest.

Logan's life is rather entertaining in itself, and there is always some sort of intrigue to keep your attention on the pages... and that's in addition to the main mystery which is brilliantly played-out, turning the depiction of a woman into a character in itself, one that seems to have an innate need to be reconciled with the real one. The writing is also rather easy to absorb, making for a rather breezy page-turner, one you can sit back and really relax to.

If you enjoy your love stories with a healthy dose of philosophy, mystery as well as plenty of character development and relationship studying, then The Lucky One will certainly be right up your alley.

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Nicholas Sparks Personal site Nicholas Sparks is an American screenwriter, producer, and book writer who, to date, has published seventeen novels as well as a non-fiction work. Eight of his novels were made into major films, the more popular ones including The Notebook and A Walk to Remember.