Remain by Nicholas Sparks & M. Night Shyamalan

I picked up Remain for the same reason a lot of people probably did, which was the M. Night Shyamalan connection. The book is one half of an unusual experiment in which Shyamalan and Nicholas Sparks built a story together, then went off to tell it in different forms, with Shyamalan writing the screenplay and Sparks writing the novel. Shyamalan’s name on anything makes me expect a twist, so I went in hoping for at least one moment where I’d have to flip back and reread a scene with new eyes. That moment never arrived, and it shaped my whole reaction to the book.

What Remain is about

The story follows Tate Donovan, a New York architect who heads to Cape Cod to design a summer home for his best friend. He’s looking for a fresh start after being discharged from a psychiatric facility, where he was treated for depression following the death of his sister, Sylvia. Before she died, Sylvia told him she could see spirits still tethered to the living world, and that the gift runs in their family. Tate is a skeptic who has trouble believing in anything he can’t see, so her claim sits badly with him, and the book follows what happens when the possibility that she was telling the truth follows him to the Cape.

On paper, that setup has a lot going for it. A grieving man who doesn’t trust anything he can’t verify, suddenly told the dead may not be gone, is a strong foundation for a story about how people cope with loss, and how badly some of us want proof that a relationship doesn’t simply end. I kept waiting for Remain to dig into that tension between skepticism and hope. Instead, it treats the grief as a doorway into a romance, which brings me to the part of my reaction that is entirely my own fault.

The love story I should have seen coming

I wasn’t expecting the center of the book to be a love story, and that’s a failure of my own attention rather than the book’s. Remain calls itself a paranormal love story right on the cover, and Nicholas Sparks is the name people associate with romance more than almost any other living author. Somewhere in my head, the Shyamalan half of the collaboration drowned out the Sparks half, and I assumed a thriller with a romantic subplot rather than a romance with a supernatural one. Once I adjusted my expectations, the book made more sense on its own terms, but it also meant the thing I’d come for was never going to show up. This is a Sparks novel with ghosts in it, and I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d gone in with that framing from the first page.

Where the twists went

Even with my expectations corrected, I still wanted the story to catch me off guard, and it didn’t. A supernatural premise with a co-creator famous for reveals sets a high bar, and the plot follows a fairly smooth, predictable path from the moment Tate arrives on Cape Cod. Predictability alone doesn’t sink a book for me, and I don’t mind seeing where a story is headed if the journey is engaging. The problem with Remain is that it isn’t especially engaging along the way. Without a twist to hold my attention and without enough emotional pull to replace it, the pages moved along pleasantly and left very little behind.

Too many people, not enough of any of them

My biggest issue was the cast. A lot of characters drift through the story, and I never got to know any of them well enough to feel attached to one. Even Tate, who is at the center of everything, stayed at a distance for me, which is a problem when his grief and his doubt are supposed to carry the emotional weight. Attachment in fiction works a lot like it does in real life, in that you need time with someone and a sense of what they want and what they’re afraid of before you start caring what happens to them. Remain spreads its attention across so many people that no relationship gets that kind of time, and the romance suffers for it, because I had trouble investing in a love story when I didn’t feel much for either half of it.

The forgettable part

Remain isn’t a bad book, and I want to be clear about that. The writing is smooth, the Cape Cod setting is easy to picture, and I never wanted to abandon it. But if you asked me for a synopsis in a couple of weeks, I don’t think I could give you much beyond an architect, a beach house, and some ghosts. It’s a strange thing to say about a book that’s literally about presences that refuse to fade, but Remain is a story I expect to forget almost completely.

Who should read Remain

I’d recommend this one to established Nicholas Sparks fans who want to see him try something with a supernatural edge, and to anyone looking for an easy, low-effort read that doesn’t demand much. If you’re coming to it for the Shyamalan twist, I’d adjust your expectations, because it isn’t that book. It’s fine, and it’s readable, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it.