Reception
The novel was published in the fall of October 1999 in hardcover print, and later in paperback edition. It spent nearly six months in the best-seller list on hardcover, and an additional four months on paperback.
The novel received mixed reviews from critics. The Sunday New York Post holds that it "never fails to be interesting, touching, at times riveting ... a book you won't soon forget". African Sun Times echoes the former's comments, saying, "A remarkable love story that, like its predecessors, will touch the hearts of readers everywhere." New York Daily News compliments Sparks, commenting that he "has written a sweet tale of young but everlasting love, and though he's told us to expect both joy and sadness, the tears will still come". Clarissa Cruz of Entertainment Weekly, however, panned the novel, saying, "With its cliche-riddled prose and plot twists that can be predicted after skimming the prologue, Nicholas Sparks' latest, A Walk To Remember, reads more like the script for a bad after-school special than anything approaching literature." Although the novel is number 12 on their list of 1999 Bestsellers Fiction, Publishers Weekly described it as "a forced coming of age story" and "the author's most simple, formulaic, and blatantly melodramatic package to date". Theresea Parks from Publishers Weekly goes on to say how many will be disappointed stating, "Readers may be frusturated with the invariable formula that Sparks seems to regurgitate with regularity." She also writes that it is especially similar to The Notebook in its "corny flashback device that mimics The Notebook." Overall Publishers Weekly expresses its disappointment.
Read more about this topic: A Walk To Remember (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)