The Lucky One: Compare and Contrast

Author’s Note:  I wrote this essay for my district writing assessment. This piece is comparing the book The Lucky One  to real life. 

The book  The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks is about a man named Logan Thibault who was recently in the marine core. While in the marines, he finds a picture during a surprise bombing.   He then finds himself being safe everywhere he goes with this picture causing him to drop out of the army to go find the girl in the picture. Realistically many people wouldn’t drop out of the army just to go and find someone because  of a “lucky” picture. Although some people might.  Apparently Logan thinks that this is the right thing to do though. This book has some parts that can be unrealistic, but overall the majority of it happens to describe things could happen to a lot of people in real life.

One thing that I found was really unrealistic in this book was when the author explains that Logan walked from Colorado all the way to North Carolina. In reality, probably know one in their right mind would want to walk that far. When Logan meets Beth, he is about to tell her that he found her picture when she assumes that he is applying for the job at her dog business. This causes Beth to ask questions about him. When she finds out about the fact that he walked that far, she thinks that he is a very strange man, giving herself a reason not to hire him.  She finally decides to hire him. The reason for this is when Logan tells Beth, ““Most people don’t know how to appreciate the silence. They can’t help talking. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to walk. ” Compared to people in real life,  the fact that he walked that far shows that it and unrealistic and different from real life.

Although walking so far is very unrealistic, there were many realistic things in this book. An example of this is the fact that Beth had been divorced and hadn’t gotten a date in a very long time. Since Beth had her son Ben, not a lot of men were looking for someone who already had a kid. I thought about this when Beth said  “Every now and then, I’d meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I’d stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later he always acted like I had the plague. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t.” I think that this kind of situation is common for people who are looking for a relationship and already have a child of their own. In the book  Logan realizes that he likes Beth and doesn’t care if she has a son. In real life, sometimes it’ s really rare to get a relationship like that. Overall this is a similarity between real life and the book.  

Along with the fact that Beth has son, she is also divorced. Divorce is very common now a day’s which makes this big part of the book very realistic. In the book Beth doesn’t like the fact that her ex- husband, Keith, is always so bossy to her son. This is also common for people who have divorced parents. Sometimes that is one of the reasons that the people get divorced. In this case , it was the reason. Ben also doesn’t agree with the fact that Keith bosses him around.  I thought about this when Ben said to Beth “I'm not going to live with you!" a small voice shouted from the kitchen doorway.
Beth looked past Keith to see Ben, his expression horrified. Ben started to back away. "I'm not going to do it!”.

In conclusion this book has many similarities and differences to real life. Overall I think that this book has more similarities to real life the differences. Some of the differences in the book make parts of it really unrealistic, but still  believable to the characters in the book. I think that this book is a good example of what a lot of people’s lives are like today.