Warner, $6.99, ISBN 0-446-61186-7
Contemporary Fiction, 2002 (Reissue)

Wait, Nicholas Sparks can actually do some decent drama! Maybe it’s time I start building a giant ark and invite everybody to come onboard to party and orgy because the Great Flood sure has to be coming next.

Of course, the author still harbors the delusion that he can write a romance story. It is when he deviates from the romance formula that A Bend in the Road achieves a semblance of readability. When he’s in the romance author mode, he’s making the heroine weeping and weeping and weeping some more all over that gnat hero until reading this book is like an hour-long puking session.

Miles Ryan is the author’s usual noble hero who has lost his wife Missy in a hit-and-run accident years ago. I tell you, scratch under Miles’s facade and you’ll find Marty Sue, the reviled placeholder for the author’s wet dreams in his own story. Like Mary Sue, the female counterpart, Marty Sue is this irritating main character who is flawless in appearance, perfect, helpful, super talented, amazing, innocent, and every other main character falls for Marty. Likewise, every villain hates Marty and causes trouble, but super talented Marty will save the day (and everybody). The plot revolves around Marty and Marty alone. Heck, he is the story.

And Mr Sparks, a big screw you for gushing that Missy is a perfect woman because she quits her job, stays home, and does the housework. Screw. You.

Anyway, Sarah Miles, our heroine falls for Miles. Why? See Marty Sue above. Sensitive. Honest. Gorgeous. Amazing. Super talented. Superhero. Captain Cardboard, or Wet Cardboard after my dog has done its business on it. Emotional scenes consist mainly of Sarah weeping as she laments how she can never live with Marty Sue here.

But then the author makes Marty lose it big time. Marty becomes violent and psychotic. I stand up and go, “Wow! Who steamrollered Satan and put Quentin Tarantino in his place?” I want more. I want Psycho Miles on a mad vigilante rampage. When Mr Sparks is not waxing nauseating she-cannot-live-without-him-will-die-die-die-without-him ass-stinkiness, he can sure write a mad, bad – and dare I say it? – sexy psycho.

Then Sarah weeps again. He’s not a psycho! He’s hurting! I mean, yes, heaven forbids a man to hurt, right? Screw him.

In the end, we are back to the male superiority nonsense all over again. By this point, those annoying conservative readers who believe that a good woman should stay at home and tend the home fires and that career women are all bitches or something like that will be in multiple orgasm heaven. That is, if they are allowed to have orgasms. But me, I have only one last thing to say: Nicholas Sparks can go sit on a screwdriver.