The Last Song written by Nicholas Sparks takes place during the summer at a beach in North Carolina. It is the summer of a young girl named Ronnie’s eighteenth birthday. She and her younger brother Jonah are spending the summer with their father.

One of the main characters in the story is Ronnie. Ronnie is a troubled almost eighteen year old girl who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life. She thinks the worst part of her summer is going from New York to North Carolina to spend the summer with her father. Who Ronnie hasn’t spoken to in three years. Her summer is starting off terrible until she meets Will, a young, tan, volleyball player.

Will comes from a wealthy family. He is attracted to Ronnie from the very beginning, and sticks with her through thick and thin even if his mother doesn’t approve of Ronnie.

Jonah is Ronnie’s younger brother, a young free spirited kid who loves his dad. Steve is Ronnie’s and Jonah’s father. He loves his kids more than anything else, but later in the story you learn that he has been keeping one very big secret from them all summer. Together they all make it a summer to remember.

In The Last Song there are many conflicts. Like Ronnie not wanting to spend the summer at her father’s house, Will’s mother not agreeing with Will and Ronnie being together, and Ronnie’s father Steve trying to fight his health problems while keeping it a secret from his children.

The climax of the story is when Steve gets put into the hospital. You don’t figure out why he is where he is until he has to tell Ronnie. She is mad at first, but she soon figures out that she is losing her dad and has no reason to be angry with him.

The theme of the story is young love. Sparks writes this story and you think it will be about just the love story between Ronnie and Will, but later on Sparks begins to incorporate every single character in a special way.

Forgive and forget is the moral of the story. Ronnie didn’t speak to her father for three years after her parents got a divorce and her father moved away to another state. Ronnie regrets that when she figures out that he doesn’t have much time left, and she knows she can never get those three years back with her father.

I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys sad, romantic novels. The Last Song is a very good story about young love, and has a very surprising ending. I enjoyed reading this book and would read many more of Nicholas Sparks’s books.