Ronnie is a 17 year old young lady who really, really needs to grow up. Sparks gives us this spoiled and rebellious child and spends the first half his story letting us get to know her in all of her self-centered ways. The girl frames every event, her every waking moment with the thought “is it going to be fun or boring for me” attitude. Most of us readers probably won’t like this version of Ronnie very much. I know I didn’t.
But, Sparks is making Ronnie grow up a little. She falls in with the “wrong crowd” at first and gets herself enmeshed in their rude and rebellious ways up to the point of being framed by one she thought was her true friend for shoplifting. But, Ronnie begins to regret her associations and turn back to her father.
Ronnie’s mom sent her and her little brother down from Manhattan to a small beach town in North Carolina, Wright’s Beach, to spend the summer with their estranged father who three years ago was divorced from their mom. Ronnie had been ignoring his mail and refusing his phone calls for three years. She refused to talk to him or have anything to do with him when she first arrived in town.
But, as the story develops Ronnie finds her ‘friends’ are not really true friends. She meets and falls in love with a fine young man. At first she spars with him and ridicules him but is gradually won over. She also begins to find out things about her divorcee father that she did not know and learns that the past events of her life are more complex than she thought. Things are not all black and white.
Sparks gives us a really touching story about a young person growing in her emotional maturity and relationship with God. As in all the other Sparks tales he also gives us big doses of humor and toward the end of the tale we get a lot of sadness and tears. But then that should be expected of Sparks.
Since a lot of the enjoyment of these kinds of stories lies in the anticipation of what is coming around the corner that we don’t know about I won’t give details and spoil it for you. “The Last Song” is a very emotional and complex story that will keep you turning pages until before you know it you are at the end. I give it a 9 of 10 on the Weaver meter.
