Unwritten

Unwritten, by Charles Martin.

I'd been running a long time. Something I was good at, comfortable with, and could keep doing for a lot longer. But the moment I'd stepped onto this plane, that'd changed. Clarity set in. In buckling my seatbelt, I'd given up control. Hand off the throttle. If I stayed with her, I became the puppet and Steady controlled the strings. What would happen when Steady the surgeon methodically picked his way around the wound, passing through the scars I used to protect me, and the scalpel cut into the stuff that was still living? With the wound laid bare, I'd have to deal with what it hid.

And, what I'd buried.

This is the first novel by Charles Martin that I've read, although he's written eight others. Unwritten started off a little slow and also ended a little slowly, but the middle part was very interesting, and I ended up liking the novel a lot.

Official synopsis:
An actress running from her past finds escape with a man hiding from his future.

When someone wants to be lost, a home tucked among the Ten Thousand Islands off the Florida coast is a good place to live. A couple decent boats, and a deep knowledge of fishing and a man can get by without ever having to talk to another soul. It's a nice enough existence, until the one person who ties him to the world of the living, the reason he's still among them even if only on the fringes, asks him for help.

Father Steady Capri knows quite a bit about helping others. But he is afraid Katie Quinn's problems may be beyond his abilities. Katie is a world-famous actress with an all too familiar story. Fame seems to have driven her to self-destruct. Steady knows the true cause of her desire to end her life is buried too deeply for him to reach. But there is one person who still may be able to save her from herself.

He will show her an alternate escape, a way to write a new life. But Katie still must confront her past before she can find peace. Ultimately, he will need to leave his secluded home and sacrifice the serenity he's found to help her. From the Florida coast, they will travel to the French countryside where they will discover the unwritten story of both their pasts and their future.
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That's a rather long-winded synopsis, but it does go over the gist of the book. There's a revelation about midway through that was a surprise to me, and it shows that Sunday - the man who Steady is friends with, that tries to help Katie Quinn after her attempted suicide - is a lot more similar to Katie than she originally thought, which was a clever twist.

The writing was decent in this book and the story flows very smoothly, for the most part. It took me a couple of days to read because it's not really the type of book I would devour, like some of the other novels I've reviewed here, but the plot was interesting and so were the characters in the novel, especially Katie, the actress. I wasn't sure how old she was originally - at first I thought she was 60+ years old because she was friends with Steady, who was around that age - but later in the book it's revealed that she's in her mid/late 30s.

I'd like to read more of Martin's novels now that I've read this one, and see if they're at all similar; if the writing style is the same, then I bet they are good reads, since I enjoyed Unwritten.

4 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I was provided a copy of this book for reviewing purposes. The opinions expressed here, however, are my own.