Safe Haven: Update/ Anaylisis

 I am beginning to become aware of the recent redundancy of my blogs. I have been reading Safe Haven for a while now, I do admit, and if someone logged onto my blog and didn't like the book Safe Haven or have any interest in it, I guess they would kind of be out of luck. This has occurred to me and I have been trying to read at a quicker pace, but in all honesty as much as I love to read and have tried to make time for it, when I face the facts I'm just a slow reader and lead a busy life style, and when I combine those two the amount of pages I read just isn't as great as I would like it to be. However, the good news is, I am almost finished with Safe Haven(finally). I plan to finish the book by my next blog and provide a great analysis, review, summary, etc.

 I have about 50 pages left and nothing has really struck me since the last blog I had that I need to blog about. I've decided to analyze author's style today, and include some good examples from the text since I feel like that is something my recent posts have been lacking. A pattern has become present over the last chapters that I've read. After I discovered Katie's story and about her husband, Kevin Tearney, I noticed that every other chapter was told to focus on Katie and Kevin. The two different chapters have a completely different mood to them as well.

Kevin's chapters:
Kevin Tearney(Katie's husband which she ran away from due to domestic violence) has a very depressed, run-down kind of mood about him. When the chapters are told to focus on him, you can clearly see how he spends his life drunk, and is always desperate and lonely. Not to mention the setting of his chapters is in Boston, which seems to be a kind of cold and gloomy place. Here are some textual examples to reflect what I am talking about:

• "Kevin Tearney didn't go to Provincetown on the weekend he'd told Coffey and Ramirez that he would. Instead, he stayed home with the curtains closed, brooding over how close he'd come to finding her in Philadelphia."(Sparks, page 193)
• "These were the questions that tormented him, and sometimes it was so confusing he couldn't stop crying because he missed her and wanted her to come home and he hated to be alone. But other times, the thought that she had left him made him dwell on how selfish she was and all he wanted to do was kill her." (Sparks, page 211)
• "He drank a third and fourth glass of vodka. It was all so confusing. The house was a wreck. There was an empty pizza box on the floor of the living room and the casing around the bathroom door was splintered and cracked. The door would no longer close all the way. He'd kicked it in after she'd locked it, trying to get away from him... He could no longer remember what they'd been fighting about."

Katie's Chapters:
In contrast, the chapters where Katie is the main focus provide a much more light-hearted, joyful mood for the reader. They are often about the many care-free summer days that she spends with Alex and his children, and the chapters are much more enjoyable to read. Below are some textual examples to reflect this:

• "Wanting to do something unusual. Alex took Katie and the ids to see the rodeo monkeys in Wilmington. Much to Katie's disbelief, it turned out to be exactly what it sounded like: monkeys, dressed in cowboy outfits, rode dogs and herded rams for almost an hour before a show of fireworks that rivaled the fourth of July."(Sparks, page 233)
• "The third week of June was a series of glorious high summer days. The temperature crept up over the course of the afternoon, bringing with it humidity heavy enough to thicken the air and blur the horizon."(Sparks, page 202)
• "That night, Alex took her to dinner in Wilmington. Afterward, they'd walked the downtown streets holding hands and browsing the shops. Every now and then, she saw Alex regarding her with amusement."(Sparks, page 219)

To wrap all of this up, I would like to make a prediction based on the evident pattern that Sparks has used for the past few chapters. I believe that this pattern is foreshadowing that Kevin and Katie will eventually somehow cross paths again because if they would not, there would be no point in the author including the chapters to focus on Kevin's perspective and what is going on with him at the same time as Katie.

Again, for my next blog  post I plan to be finished with Safe Haven and to start a new book soon!