Every Breath by Nicholas Sparks

 

genre: contemporary fiction

Hope knows she's not happy.  Her long-term relationship feels stagnant and her life in North Carolina is stable but lacking true contentment.  Tru, a safari guide, arrives in North Carolina from Zimbabwe for a meeting long overdue and when by chance he meets Hope, he realizes what his own life has been missing.  Will this connection be the stuff of true love stories?  Or does life have a way of being just too complicated for "true love" to even be real?

I know I'm not giving this review much effort.  I only read this because a prompt for one of my reading challenges is "a book by an author you previously disliked."   Turns out, Sparks just is not for me, I'm sorry.  But look, I tried again!  It IS readable, I'll give him that. It's fast and fluffy and romantic.  But the bedroom scenes felt unrealistic and actually, the whole plot of this book demanded so much of my suspension of disbelief that by the time the end rolled around, I was actually sorta irritated.  It does get two stars because I was engaged enough that I read it really quickly.  But otherwise, it was just too much and completely not enough.  Perhaps, it's not Sparks.  It's just me.