Theme

-Determination for true love


John meets Savannah in North Carolina while he is having a vacation there meanwhile Savannah is having her spring break and helping to build a house for Habitat for Humanity.Their attraction is mutual and they quickly fall in love. However,John has to leave two weeks after they met to go back to complete his army enlistment. Savannah agrees that she would wait for him to finish his tour of duty. They write letters to each other and pick up where they left off when he comes back on another leave. However they start to drift apart when 9-11 occurs and John is forced to re-enlist in the army. They begin to grow apart and eventually Savannah sends him a letter that says she is in love with someone else. John is heartbroken and stops communicating with her. Few years later, John's father dies and leaves John all the coins from his coin collection that is worth a lot of money. While John is home for his father’s funeral, he decides to go to visit Savannah.She is married with her best friend she grew up with,Tim. However,Tim has Melanoma and there is nothing the doctors can do anymore. Savannah wants to send him to a better hospital that can run experiments and tests on him but she can't afford it. John donates all the money of his father's coin collection to Tim's fund before John leaves to go back to Iraq because of his love to Savannah which can prove by what he said” I know that my feeling about Savannah will never change, and I know I will always wonder about the choice I made.”(p. 334)











-Loss of a loved one

Throughout the book there are many losses. For example, John had lost Savannah and his parents, Savannah lost Tim and almost John, and Tim lost both of his parents. They all lost their loved ones because of different things, mostly because of death or complications. People all deal with loss differently, some people go in deep depression, others try to forget it by not thinking about it at all and most people just learn to forget as time goes by. In some cases people will just accept that they are dying, like Tim, he knew that both John and himself were in love with Savannah and she was also in love with them both. Tim accepted that he was soon going to die and told John, “Because, it wasn’t the same. I know she loves me, but she’s never loved me the way she loved you. She never had that burning passion for me, but we were making a good life together. She was so happy when we started the ranch and it just made me feel so good that I could do something like that for her. Then I got sick, but she’s always here, caring for me the same way I’d care for her if it was happening to her.” (p. 324). This quotation shows how deep was Savannah’s love to Tim and John,however, she lost Tim and John at the end of the novel.