Ho hum...

“The Choice” is the latest book I have read by author Nicholas Sparks. His books are hit and miss with me. I feel like they usually have such good potential, with some spiritual aspect behind them. I was curious how his newest one would fair.

Travis Parker has a great life. He has a great job, as a small town’s veterinarian. He has a group of close friends that he gets to spend a lot of time with, enjoys boating, swimming and life in general, traveling. He does have trouble committing to a relationship however. He likes to have his life taken lightly and doesn’t want anything to hold him back.

Gabby Holland has a serious boyfriend of several years. But, he doesn’t seem to want to commit, as he hasn’t popped the question yet. She is a Physician Assistant and loves her job, but would like to settle down and start a family. She is one whom most always does things by the rules.

Gabby has a dog, Molly, that she adores. She moves to this new neighborhood and realizes that she doesn’t care too much for her new neighbor. He has a dog that seems to roam around a bit, plays loud music and seems to be very casual and has company regularly. When Gabby finds out that Molly may be pregnant, she goes over to her neighbor’s quite upset. She thinks because of his casual ways, his dog must have impregnated her poor Molly.

Gabby goes over to her neighbor, Travis’ in full attack mode. She isn’t thrilled with him and lets him have it.

Despite Gabby’s wild behavior, Travis is taken by her. He doesn’t know what it is about this red headed woman with fire in her. But, he finds himself drawn to her.

This is the basis of the novel. Opposites attract kind of story. You can kind of tell where the story will go from here. It seemed pretty predictable. After the story plays out, we jump ahead to the future where there has been an accident. Travis has to make an important decision. This part of the book seemed so random to me. It just seemed to come out of no where. Poof, we are in the future and their lives have passed by and now we come to a conflict. It seemed strange to me.

We don’t get the details of what happened with Gabby’s long time boyfriend. We don’t read of their conversations or how they dealt with their relationship. Also the recovery of an illness of a character just happens fully overnight one time. From my experience, working with that patient population, that rarely happens. It seemed far fetched to me a bit.

Sparks also has this thing with birds, significant to people in the stories interestingly. He brings this into this book as well. I remember reading something similar in one of his other novels.

I felt like this book was extremely predictable. Despite that, I really enjoyed the middle of the book with the relationships between Gabby and Travis. I am a sucker for loves stories. The story worked. Then it seemed to drop downhill right when there was this huge jump to the future. I didn’t care for that part of the story. It felt like I was reading a book, and all of a sudden I am reading a different book without full completion to the first book that I was reading.

I was let down by this book in the end. So sad to say I would not recommend it to others. It wasn’t a terrible book, it just wasn’t spectacular either.

The book had 272 pages.