When Joe, an all American teenager with a high testosterone level, met Kara, a heart stopping beauty with gold sparkles in her big brown eyes, the earth spun backwards for a moment, time stood still, and a biological imprint of pheromones cemented each other into their young minds.  At least that’s the way Joe felt.  So began the story of The Journal: Messages to Kara, by Blake Matthew James.

Cute, adorable, lovely – are three words to describe this book.  Joe and Kara had their fling during their wonder-years of adolescent puppy love, and for their own reasons parted and went their separate ways in life. The story is told by Joe, now almost 40, when he is beleaguered by his buddies to try Facebook; to join the social networking world and maybe find out what his old high-school girlfriend, Kara, is up to.  It seems that each and every day, for the last 17 years, Joe has written a journal, a diary so to speak, of his evolving feelings about his loss over Kara; whom he believed to be his one and only soul mate. Not knowing what Kara is doing, where she is living, if she’s married or single, has been an all encompassing dilemma for Joe, a perplexing omnipresent state-of-mind, and he needed to find out.  With a truly entertaining literary technique, Blake Matthew James tells his story from the present time of when Joe is starting his search for Kara to throughout receiving his email replies from her.  The book’s timeline oscillates from the mature posturing of Joe with his romantic desire to be forthcoming, to flashbacks of his memories of the many incidents of romance he and Kara had experienced.  It’s this wonderful back-and-fourth, from the present to the past, which constitutes the pace of the story, totally engulfing the reader into these preciously wonderful emotions and feelings.

At one point in the book, as Joe begins to write his journal, an interesting excerpt is: The moment my pen touched the paper, the words flowed effortlessly.  I didn’t even have to think about it…I thought about the idea of a random stranger knowing my story, reading the words that had formed in my heart, my soul, about the woman who had, whether she knew it or not, been the major contributor to who I was today.  The point made by the author is someone doesn’t need to be with you to be an influence to your decisions in life.  Whether a love lost, or the death of a spouse, sibling, friend or parent, not being with someone is not a reason for not being a part of someone.

This book is ever so original and intriguing as the romance Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had in Sleepless in Seattle.  Blake Matthew James truly brings the element of our society’s changing morals; those of having the Internet become a respectable tool for reaching out to people known from one’s past, and ties the chivalry of Joe’s integrity into focus as to how he will solve his problem – without looking desperate or lonely.  The book moves swiftly, and honestly I could not put it down, reading it in one sitting. Just when I thought I had the ending figured out….Bingo, a monkey wrench is thrown into the machinery. What will Joe do to handle his need for Kara?  Will Kara and Joe become re-united?  If you think you can guess the answer, here’s a hint: This book is ideally set up for a sequel!