At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks

Reviewed by Gerti

“At First Sight” is the first Nicholas Sparks novel that I’ve tried to read, and it has its good and bad points. On the positive side, his writing goes down as easily as cool water on a summer’s day. I like his descriptions of people and places, and his characters seem lively and fresh.

On the negative side, I really disliked the character with whom the protagonist, Jeremy Marsh, was in love. Her name was Lexie Darnell, and she’s from a small town in North Carolina. Jeremy was a writer in the big apple, and had come to Boone Creek in order to do a story for the magazine “Scientific American” on strange doings in the town cemetery. Lexie was his tour guide of sorts, and he found her irresistible. For her, he leaves NYC, and comes down to NC in order to marry her. His friends and large family adore her, or so Jeremy thinks at first, but the couple’s best friends are actively working to sabotage them.

Not that Jeremy and Lexie aren’t doing enough to sabotage their own relationship. Lexie is still actively engaged with her old boyfriend, and while she claims it’s all innocent when Jeremy confronts her about it, the simple fact that she’s lied to him at all leaves him uneasy. Next he finds out that she was pregnant before (by someone else who just drifted into town) and lost the baby. She hadn’t told him that either. She is supposed to be pregnant now with Jeremy’s child, although he had been tested in the past when his ex-wife wanted children, and found to be sterile. Yet somehow he buys Lexie’s story that the baby is his. He keeps getting mysterious e-mails which tell him to watch out for Lexie, and that has him worried as well, but to my mind, not worried enough. Wouldn’t a man previously found sterile by an MD find the fact that he’d impregnated a relative stranger after a few days together unlikely? 

And every interaction the pair has makes me like her less. They are going out to eat and she dominates what he orders. They are shopping for baby clothes and she wants to go out of town (where no one knows her) to shop. She rushes him into purchasing a house and a car that she likes, totally disregarding his feelings in the matter… In short, I was not at all sad when the surprise ending happened, and was in fact glad that he had seen the last of her. I won’t give away how it happens, but let me say that I saw it coming a mile off. 

Some people call this book a tearjerker, but the only thing I find sad about it is that a smart man like Jeremy would fall for a little manipulator like Lexie in the first place. I know most people probably don’t have that reaction, but I did. And it means the book is a miss for me. But because of his easily digestible writing (if not his likeable female characters), I might consider reading another of Sparks books.