The Best of Me

The Best of Me Review

Dawson Cole and Amanda Collier fell in love in Oriental, North Carolina, in their senior year of high school — which was also the last year either of them lived there. Dawson’s family were the town’s criminal element; Amanda’s were its respectable middle class. The gap was uncrossable then. Twenty-five years later, the death of Tuck Hoskins — the older man who took Dawson in when his family became untenable — brings them both back to a town that has changed less than either of them.

The Weight of Twenty-Five Years

The reunion premise gives Sparks access to a register his younger-couple romances cannot reach. Dawson and Amanda are not teenagers navigating first love — they are middle-aged people who have lived entire lives since they last saw each other, and whose faces, when they meet again, show each other exactly what those years have contained. The novel is elegiac in a way that feels appropriate rather than mournful: it is about people looking at the roads not taken.

Dawson’s Origin

Sparks’s treatment of Dawson’s upbringing — the violence of the Cole family, the uncle who served as the primary threat, the shame of a surname that everyone in Oriental already knows — is his most fully developed male backstory. Dawson is not simply a romantic lead with convenient brooding qualities. His choices throughout the novel are explicable because his formation has been shown.

An Ending That Gives Rather Than Takes

Where several Sparks novels close on loss, The Best of Me opts for a different kind of generosity — one that acknowledges that some loves outlast the people who carry them.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Sparks’s most elegiac reunion romance, weighted by accumulated regret and grounded in his most carefully developed male protagonist.

Reading Guides

• Nicholas Sparks Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide (2026)

The Reunion Romance as Genre

The reunion romance — two people who loved each other in youth, separated by circumstance, brought back together in middle age — is one of the oldest structures in popular fiction, and one of the most emotionally reliable. Its power comes from the accumulation of the years between: every reader who has ever wondered what would have happened if they had made a different choice at twenty brings that wondering to the reunion narrative, and the story activates those personal what-ifs in addition to its own.

Sparks is unusually skilled at managing the specific emotional register of reunion romance — at making the twenty-five year gap feel real rather than convenient, at ensuring that Dawson and Amanda’s middle-aged selves are genuinely different from their teenage selves in ways that make the reunion complicated rather than simple. The Best of Me is his best execution of this form.

Oriental, North Carolina

The novel’s setting — Oriental, a small town on the coast of North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound — is handled with the geographic warmth that characterises Sparks’s North Carolina work throughout his career. Oriental is a real town, small enough that its community dynamics are visible and specific: the way everyone knows the Cole family’s history, the way Dawson’s return is noticed and discussed, the way the town’s memory of what happened twenty-five years ago is still live in the people who were there for it.

Sparks uses small-town familiarity as both comfort and constraint. For Amanda, returning to Oriental means returning to the version of herself who loved Dawson — which is also the version of herself she has spent twenty-five years building away from. For Dawson, returning means confronting a town that has never stopped seeing him as a Cole, regardless of how far he has travelled from that identity.

The Cole Family and Class

Dawson’s upbringing — in a family whose criminality is multigenerational and whose reputation in Oriental is permanent — is Sparks’s most developed treatment of class and its transmission. The Coles are not simply backdrop; they are a specific portrait of how family context shapes a person’s options, how escaping your origins requires not just willingness but continuous active effort, and how a small community’s collective memory can function as both a social support network and a prison.

Dawson has done everything right in the decades since leaving Oriental. He works offshore on oil rigs — solitary, demanding, well-paying work that suits a man who has learned not to form permanent attachments. He is the Cole who got out. The novel is interested in what it cost him to get out and what it costs him to come back.

Tuck Hoskins as Moral Anchor

The figure of Tuck Hoskins — the older man who took Dawson in when his family became untenable, whose death provides the occasion for both Dawson and Amanda to return to Oriental — is the novel’s moral centre. Tuck is one of Sparks’s most carefully drawn minor characters: a man of genuine wisdom and genuine kindness who understood Dawson’s potential before Dawson did, and whose home was the first place Dawson experienced safety.

The novel’s treatment of this kind of non-biological family — the mentor who becomes a father figure, the chosen relationship that substitutes for the given one — is among Sparks’s most genuinely affecting. Tuck’s absence organises the novel’s present-tense grief as much as the romantic reunion does.

The Supernatural Element

The novel’s final act introduces a supernatural element — a moment that can be read as coincidence, as romantic wish-fulfilment, or as something the novel genuinely asks the reader to accept on its own terms. Sparks has used supernatural touches before — Safe Haven most explicitly — but The Best of Me’s version is more integrated with the novel’s emotional logic and more clearly prepared by the relationship the story has built.

Whether it works depends almost entirely on the reader’s willingness to follow the novel into that register. Readers who have been moved by the reunion, who have accepted Dawson and Amanda as real people whose love matters, will find it genuinely generous. Those who have maintained critical distance will find it a bridge too far.

The 2014 Film

The Best of Me was adapted for film in 2014, directed by Michael Hoffman and starring James Marsden as Dawson and Michelle Monaghan as Amanda. The film performed modestly at the box office but found a larger audience on home release. James Marsden’s performance captures the specific quality of Dawson’s gravity — a man who has been carrying something heavy for twenty-five years — with considerable skill.