Safe Haven review

When I read it: 30th June - 28th August 2014

Rating: 4/5

** spoiler alert ** Like the Nicholas Sparks book I read prior to this, 'Message in a bottle', it has also been a slow start. I think I can safely assume I will be a slow reader from the beginning and pick up the pace as the story unfolds for all of Sparks' books.

I have seen the movie before starting this book but my original plan was to do it the other way round, the reason this didn't occur was because I found the beginning simply boring and hard to get into. All the introductory chapters in books bore me and usually put me off entirely, but as I have previously seen the movie I knew there were excitable scenes to be revealed so I kept going, hopes high.

The story tells about a woman named Erin her alias Katie, because of the past she's running away from. She was in an abusive relationship and finally found the perfect moment to escape. Obviously she finds her safe haven, this including what she really never had before, friends, a loving family and a gentle partner. As expected, the drunk abusive husband of her past drops everything in his wretched life to go find her and he succeeds.

Once you really get to grips with the story and characters you start to feel warm to Katie and feel the abuse from her shoes. The literature is really something powerful to make even you as an outside being feel terrified of Kevin and his inability to see any sense.

What I got from Kevin, if anyone has read American Psycho, is the same personality type as Patrick Bateman. The way he repeats himself, the obsession with cleanliness, his obsession to beat and finally kill his once loved wife. We get to see an inside peak of his distorted mind and it's really something rare to do perfectly for a third-person POV which would naturally makes the reader feel objective but this story on the contrary still makes you feel like you're in the characters' heads.

If you're a Sparks fan, this is definitely one of his finest works.
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