The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

source: purchased
title: The Notebook
author: Nicholas Sparks
genre: romance
pages: 165
published: 1996
first line: Who am I?
rated: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars

Blurb:
Every so often a love story so captures our hearts that it becomes more than a story-it becomes an experience to remember forever. The Notebook is such a book. It is a celebration of how passion can be ageless and timeless, a tale that moves us to laughter and tears and makes us believe in true love all over again…

At thirty-one, Noah Calhoun, back in coastal North Carolina after World War II, is haunted by images of the girl he lost more than a decade earlier. At twenty-nine, socialite Allie Nelson is about to marry a wealthy lawyer, but she cannot stop thinking about the boy who long ago stole her heart. Thus begins the story of a love so enduring and deep it can turn tragedy into triumph, and may even have the power to create a miracle…

My thoughts:
Let me start my review off with a *sigh*.
Sigh.

I have shied from reading The Notebook for many years only because I like the movie so much. I felt like the novel would never live up to the movie.

A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison

source: Free review copy courtesy of Library Thing
title: A Small Indiscretion
author: Jan Ellison Twitter
published: Random House (January 20, 2015)
genre: fiction
pages: 318
first line: London, the year I turned twenty.
rated: 4 out of 5 stars 

blurb:
At nineteen, Annie Black trades a bleak future in a washed-out California town for a London winter of drinking and abandon. Twenty years later, she is a San Francisco lighting designer and happily married mother of three who has put her reckless youth behind her. Then a photo from that distant winter in Europe arrives inexplicably in her mailbox, and an old obsession is awakened.

Past and present collide, Annie’s marriage falters, and her son takes a car ride that ends with his life hanging in the balance. Now Annie must confront her own transgressions and fight for her family by untangling the mysteries of the turbulent winter that drew an invisible map of her future. Gripping, insightful, and lyrical, A Small Indiscretion announces the arrival of a major new voice in literary suspense as it unfolds a story of denial, passion, forgiveness—and the redemptive power of love.

my thoughts:
I found A Small Indiscretion to be a quiet and intense novel centered around a woman whose actions in her youth continue to carry on into her adulthood and affect not only herself, but her loved ones also.

The story goes to and from past and present as you are drawn into Annie Black’s life. Author Jan Ellison slowly drew me in, I did not know where Annie’s story was going but I wanted to find out.

Annie is a married mother whose son is in a horrible car accident and is in a medically induced coma when she begins to write down her story, which is essentially a confession, for him.