As you open The Notebook and begin reading you will find an elderly man telling a good friend of his a story of true love from a worn down notebook. That story is the tale of Noah Calhoun and Allie Nelson. The elderly man telling the story is Noah himself. His good friend is an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s that endured the story as it took place and is the reason Noah is there telling her the story and to prove to the doctors that true love conquers anything, including a disease that causes memory loss.
The only thing Noah Calhoun and Allie Nelson could think about were each other. The problem: Allie is engaged to a lawyer and Noah is trying to get his life back together after WWII. After falling madly in love that summer in ‘32 they have never been able to forget each other. One day while Allie was trying on wedding dresses she caught a glimpse of a newspaper article with a picture of a man she thought she recognized. Once looking closer she realized the man in the picture was her first true love and he was standing in front of what was supposed to be their house. That moment made her realize how much she missed him and wanted to be with him.

As the days after seeing that picture she missed Noah more and more. One day she decided she was going to return to New Bern, North Carolina, the place she fell in love for the first time. Telling Lon that she need a week to herself before the wedding she set out to a place that she never wanted to leave years ago. Knowing that going would be a mistake, Allie went anyway. After spending time to give herself an alibi she went back to her hotel and made her decision to go to that house that she had such fond memories of from that summer.

As the car came up the road Noah could already hear it. Not many cars travel down the road by his house because of the location so he went to the front porch to see who it was. As she got close enough for Noah to recognize her he stopped cold in his tracks. Allie shut the car off and stepped out looking at the man she never thought she would see again, her first love, Noah Calhoun.

Spending a couple days to catch up led to what Allie feared happening. They had fallen in love again. The more time they spent together the less they wanted to be separated until one day Allie’s mom showed up at Noah’s house. When she found Allie where she knew she would be she told her Lon was on his way to come find her. Panicking, Allie gathered all of her belongings up and rushed back to the hotel. She had a big decision to make: does she want to spend the rest of her life with Lon, the lawyer from Raleigh, or Noah, her first true love from New Bern?

Allie tells Noah, “I wish I could give you what you’re looking for, but I don’t know what it is. There’s a part of you that you keep closed off from everyone, including me” after she knew that she had to decide whether to go with Lon or Noah. This romance novel is the best novel I have ever read personally. This romance novel proves that love conquers whatever gets in its way. Nicholas Sparks did an amazing job putting this story together. The entire story being told as a flashback of the good times this couple spent together. Anyone who is into romance or a great story of suspense The Notebook is the book for you. Normally a romance story would be telling you about two young couples falling in love having a conflict then falling in love again from the point of view of a person that was only an onlooker but in this great story it is told from the point of view of Noah, the lover.