The critics, most of whom are grown-ups, should know better: How many of us (I speak as an adult to other adults) were really interesting in high school? How many of us had a clue what “interesting” meant? Jamie is into astronomy and drama club, she volunteers as a tutor, and she’s in the church choir.

Jamie has also come under critical fire for being too perfect, too bland, too boring to be believed. Some critics have derided Landon and his buddies as mere faux toughs, but I’ve a suspicion that a lot of high school toughs are faux, and you could pick worse places to look for them than this movie’s small-town Beaufort, NC setting. Landon (Shane West of TV’s “Once and Again”) is popular and cool, and thinks of himself as a rebel, though the real rebel in the film is obviously Jamie. How the Landon Carters of the world will feel about it, I have no idea. I approve of this, and I think young people who value their faith like Jamie does will enjoy and perhaps even be edified by this movie, based on the 1999 novel by Message in a Bottle author Nicholas Sparks. Also like its heroine, it doesn’t care what people think of it. Being with Jamie would show him the depths of the human heart and lead him to a decision so stunning it would send him irrevocably on the road to manhood.Like its heroine Jamie, A Walk to Remember is pious, wholesome, and eminently open to mockery and derision. Then a twist of fate made Jamie his partner for the homecoming dance, and Landon Carter's life would never be the same. She took care of her widowed father, rescued hurt animals, and helped out at the local orphanage. A quiet girl who always carried a Bible with her schoolbooks, Jamie seemed content living in a world apart from the other teens. Certainly the last person in town he thought he'd fall for was Jamie Sullivan, the daughter of the town's Baptist minister.

He even swore that he had once been in love. It was 1958, and Landon had already dated a girl or two. Every April, when the wind blows from the sea and mingles with the scent of lilacs, Landon Carter remembers his last year at Beaufort High.

A walk to remember book