Title: Predictable, shallow, disappointing
Product review: Message in a Bottle is mainly exposition-- long on melodrama and short on character development and genuine depth. The messages in the bottle that Teresa finds are supposed to provide the flesh and blood of their writer, Garret Blake. Instead, they are merely corny and cliched weepings of a shallow and maladjusted man. Teresa is no deeper. The love affair between Garret and Teresa is merely the set-up, by Sparks, for the tragedy. Garret never gets over the death of his wife, so of course he will have to die at sea--- his messages in bottles live on, of course. And then so does Teresa's message to the now-dead Garret. It's a novel full of glass bottles full of messages to dead people. Maudlin, sentimental, and predictable. In fact, the story is so shallow, no wonder Kevin Costner was picked to play the lead in the movie version.
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