week one; post two

Dear John
Nicholas Sparks
Week one; post two

I really like the beginning to this book. It has grabbed my attention and I want to keep reading. The Protagonist in this book is named John Tyree. He and his dad live together in Wilmington, North Carolina, a city close to the beach. His mom ran off when he was less than a year old, and they never talk about her (pg. 9).His dad and him have an emotional gap between them that really effects how John lives his life, and it started when John was just getting to become a teenager. His dad didn’t make much money, but what he did make he spent on collecting coins. The lack of money never bothered John until he started to notice differences between him and his friends because of it. His friends would go to the movies, but John couldn’t pay so he would be at home. He then started to take his anger of his dad. One night, John exploded at his dad about spending all of their money on coins, and their relationship was changed forever(pg.14). Before that, coins was the only thing that the two of them had in common, but since they couldn’t talk about that anymore, the conversations grew shorter and shorter. The space between them grew larger as the conversations grew shorter. John found a new group to hang out with that money wasn’t as much of a factor, but they were the wrong crowd. His grades dropped and his instead of going to college, John wanted to get a job. Fired numerous times, one night, it struck him how meaningless his life was, and how with not much time left with his dad, he wanted to make him proud, so he joined the army(pg. 17). Without he and his dad growing this gap, I think that John would have stayed focused and gone to college instead of being unmotivated and lazy.