What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Short, to the point, and absolutely unremarkable: sure to be another medium-hot romance-lite hit for Sparks, who at the very least can never be accused of overstaying his welcome.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Sparks couldn’t be less subtle in this harshly mechanical story that adheres to formula in a way that would make an assembly-line romance writer blush. Crew catalogue and a Folgers’s commercial make romance just about inevitable. Of course, the beach, an impending storm, the fact that there are no other visitors around, a roaring fireplace, and any number of moments that could have been culled from a J. Add to that a recent divorce and an estranged child and the result is a tortured soul whom Adrienne finds absolutely irresistible. Paul, of course, was not to blame, but still he suffers inside. Paul came to Rodanthe in order to speak with the bereaved family of a woman who had just died after he had operated on her. Imagining that nothing is better for a broken heart than somebody else’s sad story, Adrienne tells her daughter about the great lost love of her life. Amanda’s husband has recently died and she hasn’t quite gotten around to figuring out how to keep on living. This is the scene laid out by Adrienne to her daughter, Amanda, in a framing device of unusual crudity from Sparks ( A Bend in the Road, 2001, etc.). Paul Flanner appears, himself a cold fish in need of a little warming up. Needing to recharge her batteries, Adrienne takes a holiday, watching over her friend’s small bed-and-breakfast in the North Carolina beach town of Rodanthe. A mother unburdens a story of past romance to her troubled daughter for no good reason.Īdrienne Willis is a middle-aged mother with three kids who, not surprisingly, finds herself in an emotional lurch after her husband dumps her for a younger, prettier thing.

Nights of rodanthe book