Very rarely can a person feel sympathy and understanding from a non-living thing. Sure, squeezing a teddy bear can give you a sense of comfort, but realistically, you can't carry that kind of faux-security with you your whole life or share stories of its devotion and support with your peers. In my entire life, I can only think of one inanimate object that related so closely to something I was experiencing that it brought tears to my eyes as well as opened them to new perspectives. Nicholas Spark's A Walk to Remember brought me comfort and acceptance, as well as a sense of faith and a newfound respect for life and love. .
A Walk to Remember, in many ways, is a coming of age story. It is told from the first person perspective of Landon Carter, a wrong-way kid that ends up on the right track. Now in his 50's, he is remarrying and while visiting Beaufort, North Carolina, the town he grew up in, Landon remembers his first real love, Jamie Sullivan. She was the last person Landon would ever think to become friends with, let alone fall in love with and never forget. The daughter of a minister, Jamie seemed like the quintessential goody-two-shoes. She cared for her father, volunteered at the orphanage, got good grades, sang in the church choir and even nursed sick animals to health, everything Landon considered un-cool. Out of guilt and a bizarre twist of fate, Landon asks Jamie to the school dance and ends up volunteering to help her in the town church's Christmas play. Over time, they become close friends, and Jamie shows Landon how deep the human soul can be, opening his eyes to the power of undying faith and the strength of compassion and love. As their kinship grows, Jamie reveals that she has lukemia, a type of cancer, and her health begins to deteriorate. Her only wish before dying is to be married in the church her mother was married and buried in. Landon wholeheartedly obliges and asks her to be his wife.