There’s really only one reason why The Lucky One is such an awful book.

It’s not because it’s too boring or too long or too implausible.

It’s not because it’s exactly the same as everything else Nicholas Sparks has written, or because it’s another emotional, “sensitive” lean-back-in-your-chair-and-sigh-dreamily-every-few-pages romance which Sparks’ fans adore and have not outgrown.

It’s not because it’s based on the melodramatic premise that Logan Thibault, a US Marine, has found a girl’s photo which has become a good-luck charm, keeping him safe in Iraq, and now he’s returned home, intent on finding the girl in the photo.

It’s not because he’s apparently walked all across the country just to find her, or because Beth (the object of his extreme attention) is an “attractive,” “pretty,” “great-looking” “knockout” of a single mother who’s desperately in need of a knight in shining armor to protect her from harassment by her ex-husband, or because this ex-husband, Keith, is immature, oafish and has a taste for liquor, sports and one-night stands.

It’s not because Beth’s ten-year-old son Ben has “always been content to forge his own path”—reading, writing, playing chess, not playing video games or surfing the Web, and turning the TV off on his own after thirty minutes.

It’s not because Beth and Ben live in an old farmhouse on an idyllic 70 acres of woods and streams and fields with Beth’s grandmother, Nana, and it’s not because Nana is smart and spunky and owns a dog-training service, or because she often treats us to such “nutty turns of phrase” as “I told you the gal was sharp as a digging caterpillar” or “It’s like candy on a battleship.” And it’s not because we’re supposed to laugh at this gibberish.

Nor is it because we’re not surprised that when Thibault finally finds Beth, he stops and stares at her and she stops and stares back. It’s not because we know that she’ll dislike him at first but gradually learn to love him, or because he turns out to be as good at playing piano and helping around the kitchen as he is at fixing a truck or having a nice body.

It’s not because the first 50 pages of the book are overshadowed by the characters’ continual moody reflections on their own backstories, or because the book’s hyped-up premise represents at least 60 percent of its entire skimpy plot.

It’s not because it’s boring to watch Ben repeatedly beat Thibault at chess, or because it’s painful to listen to their humorless jokes at each other’s expense, or because we can only grimace at these stiff, unfunny exchanges that were meant to be witty or amusing or, at the very least, vaguely endearing. It’s not because the book is completely void of any kind of organic humor, or because none of its attempts at levity can elicit anything more than a courtesy-chuckle from us.

It’s not because Keith, the antagonist, has all the deep-seated complexities of an eighth-grade bully. It’s not because Thibault is his flawlessly-virtuous opposite.

It’s not because the book has no depth.

It’s not because it has no subtlety.

It’s not because it has no surprises.

It’s not because it’s highly sensationalistic and yet incredibly bland, or because it features dramatic conversations in the pouring rain, or because Thibault has long, sexy hair.

It’s not even because “Nicholas Sparks” sounds like a name from Harry Potter.

The real reason The Lucky One is so awful is this:

It’s a love story which does not explore the true concept of love.

Nicholas Sparks would rather write a story set in a farmhouse than in a ghetto. He’d rather structure it around two beautiful people than around a pair of circus freaks.

He’d rather arrange a series of artificial romance-novel cliches than consider the possibility that it can be as much about small moments as it can be about big moments.

The Lucky One utilizes every romantic convention you can think of, trying its best to translate the daydreams of naive tweens and lonely housewives into something that can be read and re-read and turned into a movie starring Zac Efron, something which, no matter how many times a loyal reader leans in to absorb its flowery, fulfilling warmth, will never, ever shed any light on what it is the reader actually wants, on why they want to read what is essentially a transcript of their own unrealized fantasies, on what is the true nature of this thing, this “love,” which the book is supposedly about.

D