Actually 1.5 Stars - I rounded up out of the goodness of my heart. Here's how I feel about my first Danielle Steel experience...
This novel is proof that a potentially great plot can be destroyed by poor writing. Sorry to all the Steel fans out there who've bought 750 million of these things, but my eyes were almost permanently stuck in the back of my head from all the eye rolling during this novel. I don't want to insult people who enjoy Steel, because she obviously has a massive following, and everyone has their own taste, but I'm really struggling to find the magic here.
I couldn't help but feel that the speed at which she writes novels affects how well they are written. I also wonder if her books are combed through well enough by an editor or if the editors sort of cover their eyes, given how well her books tend to sell anyway. She's written six novels this year alone (and there's still a month left for chrissakes!). Someone has to say, "No, Danielle, enough for this year!"
One credit to Steel: I like her dialogue, she writes it well; you can actually picture the characters saying the words. Something I think she did particularly well was children's dialogue in this novel. BUT, she doesn't use dialogue enough to show/tell us the story. Rather, she uses waaaaay too much exposition and fluff, which had the effect of disengaging me from the tale. I want to be part of the story, not separate from it. Which leads me to...
Her major flaw: Exposition and the use of 'and' as both a conjunction and starter to a sentence/paragraph. (By use, I mean overuse.) If you read a Danielle Steel novel you'd assume that the most common word in the English language is no longer 'the,' but 'and.' After a while it sounded a bit like this: "and then, and then, and then, and then, and then....and so on." Example, in the second paragraph on page 25, 3 of the 7 sentences begin with And. Two of those sentences also use 'and' as a conjunction. The writing is novice at best, hardly what I expected from such a seasoned and successful author.
Steel also hashes over the details with so many redundancies and clichés it made my brain hurt. At some points, I was literally laughing at the words on the page, not out of humour, but out of frustration and annoyance. To properly have told this story, you would need another 300 or 400 pages to get the nuances needed to actually make the reader feel something. This is the kind of story I imagine someone like Margaret Atwood writing well.
All that said, I'll likely pick up another Steel novel because I want to give her the benefit of the doubt. I'm hoping this one was just a very, very bad seed. Only time will tell.