At First Sight

I want to start with the odd shape of this book, because it explains everything else about it. At First Sight came out in October 2005, six months after True Believer, the novel most readers meet first. Same author, same year, same small North Carolina town. It was also supposed to be an epilogue. Sparks had written forty-five pages of what he thought would be a closing section for the first novel, and his editor told him it was too long and that it damaged the effect of the book it was attached to. So he pulled it out and wrote it as a novel of its own, which is a strange and revealing way for a sequel to be born.

So by the time you open At First Sight, the romance is over. Jeremy Marsh and Lexie Darnell have already met, already fallen in love, already decided to leave New York City for Lexie's hometown of Boone Creek. This book is about what happens after love at first sight, which is a harder subject and a rarer one. The publisher's own description puts it plainly: there are a few things Jeremy was sure he would never do, among them leaving New York, giving his heart away again after a failed marriage, and becoming a parent. Then Lexie is pregnant, and all three of those certainties start to come apart.

I finished it in a day and a half and then sat with it for a week, because the ending is going to be the thing you remember, and it is not a small thing.

What the first book left behind

For readers arriving fresh, here is the setup from the first novel, using the summary Publishers Weekly printed when they reviewed this one. When we last left 37-year-old Jeremy Marsh, a science columnist based in New York, he had come to Boone Creek, North Carolina, to chase a story and ended up falling in love with Lexie Darnell, the 30-year-old town librarian. He was divorced, and his first marriage had failed partly because of infertility. He believed in evidence and wrote about the paranormal for a living, which made him the wrong man for a town whose favorite story involved lights in the cemetery that nobody could explain. Lexie believed in the town, in her grandmother, in things science cannot pin down.

At First Sight picks that up roughly six months later, at the stage where Jeremy has proposed. He and Lexie are in New York, packing for Boone Creek, and Lexie has one condition: nobody knows about the pregnancy until after the wedding. Her reason is practical and, honestly, thin. She has known this man for a matter of weeks, and she does not want the town deciding that they married because of a baby. Only two people know: Lexie's grandmother Doris, who is the town psychic and a repository of local history, and Jeremy's longtime best friend Alvin, who is in New York and clearly worried about the pace of all of this.

Then the two of them move south and start building the life, and the book turns into a long, tense countdown to a wedding.

A wedding, a house, and no columns

Jeremy cannot write. He is a journalist who has to file columns and cannot make himself do it, and the novel is smart enough to make this a plot problem rather than a decorative one. Without work, the move to Boone Creek has no logic. A New York salary paid for the renovations on the house they are buying, and the renovations keep eating it, and Jeremy's savings shrink while he sits in a town where he has no friends, no job he can do, and a wedding to get to.

Doris tries to help. She is the novel's best invention: a grandmother who keeps a handwritten journal of predictions about the sex of every baby born in the town, has been right every time, and treats prophecy the way other people treat filing taxes. She lends Jeremy the book and suggests that he write a column about it. Sparks uses her to do something clever with the genre, because the first novel's whole argument was about whether the ghost lights in the Boone Creek cemetery were real, and the grandmother is the one character who has spent her life taking the supernatural seriously without ever making a fuss about it.

The supporting cast is the usual Sparks bench. There is a meddling mayor. There is a sullen townie ex named Rodney, who had been chasing Lexie for years before Jeremy arrived and who now has a girlfriend named Rachel, and both of those relationships are in trouble from page one.

The emails

The engine of the book is a pair of anonymous emails, and the first one is one of the more unpleasant pieces of writing in the genre because it is so small. It says: how do you know the baby is yours?

Jeremy is a man who has spent his life explaining things, who believes that if he can just gather enough facts the dread will dissolve into something he can handle. And here is a fact he cannot handle: he has never been able to conceive a child, and that is the reason he believes his marriage failed. So an anonymous accusation that the baby is not his does not read as an insult. It reads as a possibility he cannot rule out. And the person it most wants to be true is Rodney, who wanted Lexie first.

Jeremy spots Lexie sitting alone with Rodney, holding hands. He decides not to think about it. Rachel then disappears for several days, and the town worries. Jeremy goes looking for Lexie, finds her car at Rodney's house, waits outside, and the two of them have a furious argument in which Lexie does not tell him what she was doing there. He leaves and stays at the local motel, which in a novel like this is a formal signal, the literary equivalent of a note left on the kitchen table.

The second email arrives and it is worse: Hasn't she told you the truth? Read Doris's journal. You'll find the answer there.

Jeremy reads the journal. Four years earlier, Doris had recorded a prediction: a miscarriage, with Lexie's initials in it and a father's name beside it. It is the reason Lexie did not tell him about the fertility problem herself, and the reason he assumed the mystery was about paternity. Two secrets, one journal, and both of them explained by the same mistake.

Then Jeremy flies to New York for his bachelor party, and the mystery collapses. The emails came from Alvin, his best friend, who did not think the couple should be marrying after so short a time. Alvin only knew what he knew because Rachel, in a fit of anger or panic, had gone to New York and told him about the miscarriage. Jeremy tells Alvin he never wants to speak to him again. Then he catches the next flight back to Boone Creek.

This is good plotting. The mechanism is clean, the reversal is fair, and every piece of it was planted earlier: the car, the argument, the motel, the journal Doris lent him, the grandmother who cannot keep a secret about a baby. The suspicion that seemed paranoid in chapter ten turns out to have been accurate and aimed at the wrong person entirely.

The wedding and the ultrasound

They talk. Both admit they were wrong in their own way, Jeremy tells her about the emails and Alvin and Rachel, and Rachel eventually comes to Lexie's house and apologizes. There is a wedding, and it is a happy one, and Lexie's parents are part of it only as memory. The first half of the book resolves.

Then the ultrasound, and trouble: an amniotic band, the kind of thing that can attach and damage or kill. Jeremy and Lexie spend the last ten weeks of the pregnancy in fear. Lexie, who has watched him uproot his life for her, offers to move back to New York so that he can work and be near family. He turns it down. Almost immediately his writing block breaks, and the column he files is the one Doris gave him. He has been blocked because he was a stranger pretending he had a career, and the moment he accepts that he belongs here, the work comes back.

Then Lexie wakes him in the early morning to say she is in labor, and he is, in the true sense of the word, useless.

Claire

She delivers their daughter. The baby is named Claire, for Lexie's mother. And then Lexie dies.

There is no warning in the prose that the reader gets, which is the technique. The book has spent hundreds of pages teaching you that Lexie is the warm one, the local one, the one with the grandmother and the library and the town that has already adopted her. She is the one who has to be brave. She is the one everybody protects. She is also the one who dies, in a hospital, giving birth, and the last thing the reader has is the fact that she did it anyway.

I will not pretend this is subtle. It is the most calculated move in the book, and Sparks clearly knows it. Publishers Weekly's review ended with a sentence that has stayed with me because it is fair about both halves: the book throws in a substantial zinger at the end, and it is majorly manipulative and totally effective. Have plenty of tissues on hand. That is an accurate description of what the ending is doing to the reader, and it does not settle whether that is good writing.

There is a version of this novel where Lexie survives and the book ends with a house full of noise. There is a version where the amniotic band takes the baby and Lexie lives. Sparks took neither. He stacked every tragedy he had access to into one night, which is a writerly choice rather than a realistic one, and readers who come to Nicholas Sparks for the redemption will be furious. Readers who come for the gut punch will not be disappointed.

The epilogue and the lights

The last section is short and it is the one I keep thinking about. Claire is four. She has been having nightmares several times a week, the kind she had after her parents died, and Jeremy cannot fix them. He takes her to the cemetery where Lexie and her parents are buried, at midnight, on a foggy night, and the same phenomenon that the first novel was about happens there: the lights. After that night, Claire stops having nightmares.

So the supernatural thread of the first book comes back to deliver a child who cannot sleep, and the book refuses to explain it, exactly as the first book refused to explain it. Sparks is consistent here, and consistency is worth something in a writer as careless as he is elsewhere. The lights in the cemetery are not a plot device to be solved. They are the reason the town exists, and now they are also the reason a little girl can sleep.

What works and what does not

The grandmother works. The emails work. The wedding sequence, with all its small-town machinery, works. And the book is a better novel than it has any right to be, because Sparks understands something about his own genre that most writers in it do not: the reader is not there for the proposal, the reader is there for the wedding, and the wedding in a small town is a production with a cast, a schedule, and a cake.

What does not work is the plumbing. The medical situation is thin, since a diagnosis serious enough to frighten both parents for ten weeks resolves in a delivery that goes unremarked. The mystery is solved by a single document that the characters have access to at any time, and nobody thought to open the psychic grandmother's prophecy book until an anonymous stranger emailed a hint. Alvin, who turns out to have sent cruel messages to his best friend, is treated as a man who was worried rather than a man who acted cruelly, and the book lets him off without much work. The love-at-first-sight premise belongs to the first novel; by the time this one starts, the premise has already been cashed in, and what is left is a story about trust that would have been more interesting without the mystery around it. A reviewer on about.com called it a cliché, and while I think that is unfair about the whole book, it is not wrong about the emails.

Who should read it, and in what order

Read True Believer first. It is the better of the two books, mostly because it is the one where Sparks is inventing rather than extending, and it has the ghost lights in it, which are far more interesting than the emails. At First Sight works best as the second half of that story, read back to back, which is how I read it.

If you liked The Notebook or A Walk to Remember, this is a different temperature. The stakes are higher, the tone is darker, and the ending is not the kind you expect from him. If you want a romance with a clean ending, do not start here. If you read True Believer and thought it was thin, this one is thinner, and it ends worse.

It is still in print from Grand Central Publishing, in a 2024 trade paperback, so it is easy to find in any bookshop. Bring tissues. Sparks asked as much.