Book Review: Safe Haven, Nicholas Sparks

It has been quite a while since I've really picked up a book and read. About time I started again.

Just put down "Safe Haven". I've never read a Sparks book. When Hubby and I first started dating, we saw "The Notebook" and loved it. But, I'm not really a mushy book reader, so I hadn't picked up any of his other works. This story hit a personal note for me, though, and I was able to move beyond the mushy.

The book tells the story of Katie, a woman trying to escape from her abusive husband, and her journey to heal herself and find love again.

I've experienced violence in marriage, it is a very difficult topic to approach and to describe without getting sucked into unnecessary back story and nonsense. Sparks takes a very direct route to abuse, and delves into the psychology behind it. We come to understand the fear that a woman feels when her husband becomes so dominating that he crosses that line. He also ventures into the tightrope an abuser walks between love for himself and hatred for others, verses love of others and hatred of himself.

If I had known that Sparks wrote this much psychology into his stories, I probably would have read him sooner, and I will be reading more of him in the future. I had a lot of self-reflection while reading this. Things that I could have done to stop the abuse, things that he could have done to not be that way. Ways we could have resolved the situation before it became as bad as it did. Could we have fixed it? Who knows. But we might not have gotten that close to killing each other.

Thank you, Nicholas Sparks ... I needed that experience. I needed that closure.