OFHS Student Group discussion

When people say Nicholas Sparks, they think of romance novels and crying. Well, his book “The Last Song” is, but it is more than that. Nicholas Sparks shows the value of family, and spending time with the ones you love through a tear-jerking story of a divorced family, and a terminal cancer. I think “The Last Song” is different from all the other cancer books of America because it shows more happiness than the sadness. In Nicholas Sparks’ book “The Last Song,” he shows a family reconnecting after a terrible divorce, when Steve Miller invites his daughter, Ronnie, and his son, Jonah, to spend the summer with him in North Carolina. The story is told in third person, and changes every chapter to a different character’s point of view. But mostly, it holds the point of view of Ronnie. Ronnie, short for Veronica, having been arrested a few times for minor crimes such as shoplifting, wants anything but to go spend the summer with her father, because she hates him. She believes that her father caused the Divorce. Jonah misses his father terribly, and wants nothing more than to spend the summer with his dad. Steve has a secret, a secret he doesn’t want his kids to know, he wants them to find out later, much later. And if he could, he would never tell them. As the summer goes on, Ronnie starts to enjoy North Carolina, and though she hates to admit it, she starts to love her father again too. She makes new friends, gets a good tan, gets closer with her family, and does what she least expected on this family trip-she falls in love. Will is a rich, educated, highly attractive beach volleyball player who just wants to play volleyball, go to college, and be a change the world wants to see. The first time they meet, she is hit by him running after his volleyball, and she gets her smoothie dumped on her favorite shirt. The chemistry is undeniable, but she refuses to believe it, because she doesn’t need some summer romance weighing on her mind for when she goes back to her mom in New York. When she finally understands that she has fallen head over heels for Will, he takes her and her little brother to see a hatching baby sea turtle nest, and things go from perfect to broken. Her father starts coughing up blood on their back porch and calmly tells them to take him to the hospital. It is there that his children discover their father’s secret. Though the summer is not over yet, the kid’s days are spent at the hospital with their father. At the end of the summer, Ronnie stays in North Carolina with her father as he goes through endless days of chemotherapy, radiation, and no signs of hope. Will goes off to college and stops calling. Ronnie’s love for her father, though, is enduring, and she finishes her father’s unfinished, lifelong piano score, and plays it for him. But what about Will? What about the love-filled summer they had together on the North Carolina beaches? Will Ronnie ever be able to love again after she lost the father she loved so much? Will love shine through the stained glass window that cancer left behind? I won’t give that away you will have to read the book! This book is by far one of my favorites; Nicholas Sparks’ writing is unbeatable and so emotional. It reminded me of the good times I had spent with my grandmother before she died of breast cancer, and the times I spent with my boyfriend in the hospital with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma cancer, and the grief my family went through. When Steve died, I cried for a half hour before I could keep reading! Although the book had a sad story, the romantic parts and the pure joyful parts spent by the children and their father was so heartwarming, it would be hard not to rate this book a full five stars.