The Rescue - Nicholas Sparks [June/06]

Nicholas Sparks has always been an author that I am surprised to like. I have owned The Rescue for a while, but just never got around to reading it. Now that I have it done, I just have his two newer novels to read: True Believer and At First Sight. Then, I believe he has a new book coming out in the fall. There is just something about his books that I don't mind, and I can tell people I have a broad taste in books because if I read no other romance novelist, at least I read him.

From the back:

Volunteer fireman Taylor McAden is driven to take terrifying, heroic risks to save lives. But there's one leap into the unknown he can't bring himself to make: He can't fall in love. A man who likes to rescue troubled women, he inevitably leaves them as soon as they want more from him. Then, one day, a record-breaking storm hits his small Southern town, and Taylor comes across a young single mother named Denise Holton in a crashed car. When she revives, Taylor finds himself looking for her missing son - and involved in a rescue different from all the others. This one will require him to open doors to his past slammed shut by pain. And with Denise's help, dare him to make the greatest commitment of all: love someone forever.

I am glad that it took me a while to read this book because by the time I had read it, I had already finished Three Weeks with my Brother. By reading that book, I got an idea why the characters act the way they act. You see, Nicholas Sparks has a son who has speaking trouble and him and his wife spend years dealing with incorrect problems before finally taking matters into their own hands. In The Rescue, Denise is going through the same thing with her son. He is in all matters are normal child, but he just has trouble speaking. Sparks has captured his families own struggle in the pages of this novel, something I would not have picked up on if I hadn't read Three Weeks with my Brother first.

In this novel, Taylor is dealing with demons. His mother thought that she did a good job raising him after his father died, thought that she had made his childhood as normal as possible, but Taylor can not get passed the things that happened to him in his past. He thinks he does not deserve to be happy, and so the moment that he feels that way, he tries to destroy it. At the same time he tries to make everyone else around him happy, even if he himself can't be. He is determined to make it so that no one grows up with the pain he experienced his whole life, and especially do everything he can to make sure that no one grows up without a father.

Then Taylor meets Denise. She is new to the town and raising her son Kyle all by herself, as he was an accident and she hardly knew his father on the night that they conceived him. She has given up her whole life for this sweet little boy, and Taylor finds that he feels the need to help her. Things go great for a while, but once again Taylor starts to find himself happy and he can't allow that to happen. Even if that means destroying a little boys happiness. Kyle is so dear, though, even if he can't say the words that he needs to say he seems to be aware of what is going on around him. When Taylor starts to drift away, he knows it is happening and accepts it. It is as simple as that.

In the meantime, Taylor's friends and family join together to try and get Taylor to accept that everything that happens is not always his fault. The demons he is running from were not something he intentionally did, they happened when he was just a child after all. The Rescue is really a novel about a man trying to find his way out of the storm and to a woman that cares and a young boy that needs a father figure.

4/5