E — EVERY BREATH, written by Nicholas Sparks; published by Grand Central Publishing

 Reviewed by Debi O’Neille

When I’m in the mood for a love story, something more realistic than your average rom-com, I reach for Nicholas Sparks. When you open one of his books, you know you’re not going to be sitting on the edge of your seat as a masked slasher sneaks up behind an unsuspecting soul. You’re not going to be holding your breath through some outlandish car chase that only a trained stunt driver could handle, and though there will be romance in the novel, you are not guaranteed that it will end happily ever after, though you can depend on there being peaks and valleys throughout the novel. They’re just the emotional type instead of the car-chase type.

Yet EVERY BREATH did stretch a little outside of the author’s usual box. Generally, we know his books have some trivial or profound or trivial-turned-profound little story or statement early in the novel, and the novel will circle back to that same moment near the end. (I love it when he does this!) And then it’s time to grab the tissue box. It’s time for tears. And when I start reading one of his books (knowing he’s going to do that) and telling myself that I’m not going to cry, he still manages to get me. Every time.

What I found most amazing the first time I ever read a Nicholas Sparks book, back in his early days as a novelist, was that I had been reading along at a leisurely pace, and though the writing was exceptional, I didn’t find anything profound with the characters. No one was heightened to any exceptional degree. These were all just average people living an average life. I kept asking myself, what is all the hype about this guy?

Trust me. I kept reading and I experienced what the rest of his fan club does. Reading a seemingly average story that without you realizing it has brought you into another world, and suddenly you are hit hard with the effect their lives have when you live it.

This book definitely does that, and it’s also educational. There’s a lot of facts about Africa, animals, and religious culture in this book. Sometimes I felt educating the reader seemed just a wee bit forced, when all I really wanted was a good story. That might turn some readers off, and yet, not every reader I’ve spoken to feels that way. Some didn’t find any of it forced. Others thought those particular sections boring and skimmed through all the educational “facts.” Forced or not, I never found a single of his words boring.

To mix things up a bit, he wrote EVERY BREATH as a frame story. Basically, it is a story framed inside of another story. I’ve seen the technique done before, and I even tried it once myself. (My short frame story did find a small amount of success, but only after I deleted the opening and ending frame – the bookends, so to speak, and turned it into a story that wasn’t inside of another story. Sometimes that’s what you have to do, start with one idea for the structure of your story, and if that doesn’t work, change the structure to something else.

But, of course, it did work for Nicholas Sparks. I’m not sure I liked the frame, but I’m actually not sure that I didn’t like it either, but I personally found it a bit distracting. Or maybe it was just that I was impatient to get back to the story inside the story. Or was it the outside of the story I was anxious for?

And there you have it, my meaningless bit of confusion that really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because the book was good either way. Why wouldn’t it be? I mean, it’s Nicholas Sparks. And when you want to feel as though you’ve fallen in that deep kind of love that lasts into eternity, and when you want to feel that you’re loved like that in return, he’s the man to offer a story to do it.

Happy reading!