The Notebook Summary with Spoilers

The Notebook started out as a fascinating novel by Nicholas Sparks. It was originally released in 1998, but a more popular mass paperback version released in 2004. The movie was released on DVD in 2005, but it remains an incredibly popular movie to this day. Nicholas Sparks is one of the most respected modern writers because he has the ability to paint a realistic world with characters readers can't help but care about. That is exactly what he managed to do with The Notebook. This summary of The Notebook will contain some spoilers and will give away the main twist of the story. If you don't want to hear that, find The Notebook summary without spoilers.

The Notebook starts out with an introduction to Duke and an unnamed elderly woman. Both are residents in a nursing home who like to spend their time reading from a notebook. Duke has a clear memory, but the woman is obviously suffering from a mentally disabling disease that causes lapse of memory. She enjoys listening to the stories that Duke reads her from the notebook.

The main story comes in the form of the words Duke reads. As he reads to the elderly woman, the reader or movie watcher is taken through the story in the notebook as well. It is the story of a young girl from a rich family named Allie and a boy from the other side of the tracks named Noah. In a way, it is the stereotypical Romeo and Juliet story in that you have a rich girl and poor boy with great parental disapproval on the part of the rich girl's parents.

The central story unravels as Allie and Noah fall in love and come close to making love, but her family shows up and moves her away from Noah. She doesn't even get to tell him goodbye and goes away with the stabbing pains of love lost. She waits for him to write to her, not knowing that her mother is intercepting all of the letters and hiding them. Noah writes her a letter every day for a solid year, but she doesn't know this and eventually goes to college and starts the rest of her life without him.

That may sound like the end of the central story, but it is not. Allie gets engaged to another man, but reads about Noah in the local paper before she says "I do." He is fixing up the house where they almost made love years before. He is restoring it exactly the way she said she wanted it all those years earlier. She goes to visit him and they end up passionately making love.

Romeo and Juliet do not have a tragic ending in this version of the tale. Allie ends up returning to Duke and later her memory lapses. She writes her love story down in notebook and gives it to Noah, instructing him to read it to her when she can no longer remember him. They end up being the characters in the nursing home, reading from the notebook so she can come back to him!