Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole were in love when they were in high school. The only problem was that Dawson was a Cole and Amanda was a Collier. Dawson's family was the kind of family always in trouble with the law for something. And Dawson never felt as though he fit in with them. He eventually moved out and lived in the garage of Tuck, he ran an auto business and he allowed Dawson to live there and took care of him when his family came calling and took all of the money that Dawson was making from his part time job. Dawson was a pretty good kid, no matter what Amanda's parents thought of him, but he had the bad luck to kill a man in an auto accident and get sent to jail for it, when it wasn't necessarily his fault. Dawson was able to get his life together. He lives in New Orleans and works on an oil rig in the ocean. He's been in several accidents on the rig, but never any like the one that almost took his life. It was an explosion that knocked him and all the other men into the ocean, but he was saved by a man he had never seen before, even though he knows most of the men that work on the rig. Tuck dies and he returns to his hometown, as kind of Tuck's last wish for him, but he continues to see the man from the rig everywhere. And of course there's Amanda, married for almost 20 years, she now has 3 kids and a husband who likes his drink. But Amanda's going to have to make a choice, her marriage or Dawson. I usually like books by Nicholas Sparks, and it wasn't that I didn't like this one, it was more that I had a really hard time with this book. Dawson's cousins weren't very nice to anyone, even women in this book, maybe it was just a little rough for me. I did enjoy the ending. Nicholas Sparks doesn't write every book like A Walk to Remember, that's probably my very favorite of his books.
