Palomino

by Danielle Steel

Samantha Taylor is shattered when her husband leaves her for another woman. She puts her advertising career on hold and seeks refuge at a friend's California ranch, where she loses herself in the daily labor of ranch life.

Here, she discovers the healing powers of trusted friends, simple joys, and hard work. She also meets Tate Jordan, the ranch foreman, and a tumultuous relationship ensues.

When Tate disappears and a fall from a horse changes Samantha's life forever, she is confined to a wheelchair and must look deep inside herself to finds the courage to begin again.

Now, fighting the battles of the handicapped, she finds new challenges, new loves, and even the adopted child she's always longed for.


From the Paperback edition.

Genres: Romance, Fiction, Chick Lit, Contemporary Romance, Contemporary, Drama, Novels

463 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 1981

About the author

Danielle Steel has been hailed as one of the world's bestselling authors, with almost a billion copies of her novels sold. Her many international bestsellers include All That Glitters, Royal, Daddy's Girls, The Wedding Dress, The Numbers Game, Moral Compass, Spy, and other highly acclaimed novels. She is also the author of His Bright Light, the story of her son Nick Traina's life and death; A Gift of Hope, a memoir of her work with the homeless; Expect a Miracle, a book of her favorite quotations for inspiration and comfort; Pure Joy, about the dogs she and her family have loved; and the children's books Pretty Minnie in Paris and Pretty Minnie in Hollywood.

Facebook.com/DanielleSteelOfficial
Instagram: @officialdaniellesteel

Reviews

[Bnice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first Danielle Steel book and I loved it. I have the old version with 306 pages so I didn't have as much reading to do as the newer version.
"Palomino" was a good read. I enjoyed the book because it had so many twists and turns, but poor Samantha having all these issues to deal with from a lousy husband leaving her, to a handsome Ranch Hand falling in love with her and leaving her, then to a loving child she tried to adopt not going thru, gee whiz after all that you think it was over HECK NO! She then becomes paralyzed from the waist down.

I enjoyed going through the journey with Samantha as she endured all these terrible trials. She was a strong woman, who was young, vivacious and who had good friends and an undestranding boss who was on her side. She was great at what she did as a commercial wrtier, producer and despite her disability proved she could keep on going. It wasn't easy but she maintained her dignity and continued to live!

I hated her husband for leaving her, but I really fell for Tate Jordan the ranch hand who fell in love with Samantha. He gave her the name Palomino because of her hair. Their love story was genuine and as they fell in love it was sad to see it end over thoughtless pride and old rules that need to have been broken.

Alot of characters in the book and different scenarios but overall a good read. I do look forward to reading more of Ms. Steels books, but for now I'm content with this read. Thank you!

[Francesca · Rating 3 out of 5]

*** ATTENZIONE SPOILER ***

(Ispirato alle ultime pagine del libro)

Poi, lentamente, dando un colpetto di redini allo stallone, salì oltre la piccola altura. Rimase lì, mentre le lacrime, che scendevano lente, le rigavano le guance. Improvvisamente, mentre osservava quel luogo, che pareva appartenere a un'altra vita, si accorse che il purosangue si innervosiva e, guardandosi intorno, lo vide, ritto fieramente, come sempre, sul suo destriero, anche lui la faccia bagnata di lacrime, la robusta corporatura dall'atteggiamento altero e la forza dei suoi lineamenti mitigate da un'espressione di infinita dolcezza. Poteva ancora fidarsi realmente di lui? Sarebbe fuggito di nuovo? Era un sogno, un'illusione? Mentre lo fissava negli occhi, non ebbe un tremito la sua figura, e lei poté quasi sentire che il loro legame era forte come un tempo. Entrambi erano a casa. Finalmente.

Danielle Steel distribuisce disgrazia e morte, manco fossero dei buoni sconto, per tutta la durata della storia! Non me l'aspettavo. In realtà, non conoscendo affatto l'autrice ed essendo questo il suo primo libro che leggo, non sapevo esattamente cosa aspettarmi. Ci sono alcuni stereotipi che si ripropongono, in alcuni punti, a mio avviso, in maniera eccessiva, ai limiti tra il ridicolo e l'irritante, ma, nel complesso, le vicende narrate mi hanno coinvolta e lo stile della Steel è particolarmente adatto al mio gusto del momento. Perciò leggerò di certo altri suoi libri.

[John Mirmina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This was really unexpected. Lots of twists and turns! Had trouble putting it down at times, and the ending, while good, had me wanting more or a sequel. Would rate this a 6/5 if I could. Definitely one of Danielle Steel’s best!

[Daniel Rios · Rating 5 out of 5]

¡Uy! No apto para llorones como yo. No había llorado tanto con un libro en mi vida entera (Bueno sí, pero lloré mucho). Tengo que agradecer a la persona que me lo regaló. No sé ni qué decir, no quiero decir nada porque me gustaría recomendar este libro a muchos amigos míos que les gusta este género y no quiero ser un spoiler. Simplemente tengo que decir que me gustó demasiado y no dudaría en leer otro libro de Danielle Steel.

[*The Angry Reader*]

A friend mentioned Danielle Steel tonight, and I remembered that I had read this book. It has to be 20 years since I read it. But I can still remember parts of it clear as day. I kinda wanna read it again - but I’m also nervous that I might ruin the mystique.

[Franca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like so many others this was one of my first romance novels and first Danielle Steel book, it was sooo many years ago, but for some reason I can remember the storyline and I remember enjoying it. I've read other Danielle Steel books, but this in the only one that stood out for me!

[Sarah Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Danielle Steel's novel, "Palomino," was pretty good. However, unfortunately, it DID NOT meet the high expectations that I had hoped that it would. :-(. I found out that I preferred watching the made-for-TV movie MUCH MORE. Some details contained within Danielle Steel's plot were the represented similarly in the movie, but others were vastly different. I am glad that I can now say that I have read "Palomino," but it DID NOT have me as hungry, enthralled, or engrossed as I had wanted to be. It was not NEARLY AS impressive as "Wanderlust" was for me.

[Book's Calling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dlouho jsem tuto americkou autorku odsuzoval, přiznávám, že bezdůvodně, jen tak z podstaty. Proto jsem si chtěl udělat vlastní názor. Palomino jsem vybral na základě hodnocení čtenářů na Databázi knih – zrovna tato kniha je hodnocena skoro nejlépe. A já s tímto hodnocením musím souhlasit. Četla se mi výborně, těšil jsem se na každé další řádky, naprosto jsem se vžil do děje. Samozřejmě ukáplo i několik slz. Nemůžu říct, že Steel je skvělá spisovatelka, protože jsem četl jen jednu její knihu, ale pokud jsou i ostatní takto dobře napsané, chápu její celosvětový úspěch. Palomino byl pro mě zážitek (až na několik překladových podivností). A jak jsem sám sobě slíbil, podíval jsem se i na film. Pane bože, to byl hrozný zážitek. Jak je kniha dobrá, tak je film špatný.

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

If Palomino is representative of her work, I can comfortably say that Danielle Steel is not a good writer -- period. She repeats words and phrases, she changes narrator mid-paragraph and her sense of time is completely out of whack. Palomino's characters are stereotypically perfect, the plot was rambling and things fell into place much too conveniently. This 450-page beast was a waste of my time.

[Yvonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the first books I read by Danielle Steele. She has turned out to be one of my favorite authors to read as a quick "summer read". What can I say -- I'm a sucker for romance novels!

[Maeva ( maevareadsbooks_ ) · Rating 3 out of 5]

[English below]

C’est le deuxième roman que je lis après Ouragan, lu il y a deux ans, je n’avais pas trop apprécié le premier, et je n’ai pas été plus emballé par celui-ci,histoire soit différente, mais c’est pour moi de la littérature commerciale, tant mieux si ça plaît à certains ou certaines, mais je vais dorénavant passer mon chemin. Certaines situations sont ridicules, certains dialogues sont ridicules, SPOILER : je n’y connais rien en adoption, mais je doute que cela puisse se faire en une journée, concernant ta apprends qu’elle ne pourra plus jamais marché et ce retour en fauteuil roulant à 32 ans ou quelque chose comme ça, elle dit : « oh zut », non mais sérieusement ? ! Et puis se dire, je t’aime au bout de deux jours, je t’ai toujours aimé, bla-bla-bla… Non c’est bon j’arrête là.


[English]
This is the second novel I read from this author after reading Rushing Waters two years ago. I had not really liked the first one but I wanted to give the author a second try and I think this will be the last one because this is really not for me, some ridiculous situations, some ridiculous dialogues, rich people problems, people who meet and tell each other I love you, I’ve always loved you after two days, SPOILER: I know nothing about adoption, but I really doubt this can be done in one day and also when Samantha discovers she will never be able to walk again and will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair at 30 years old-ish, she just says “ oh darn” or something like that, really?! Thank you but no, thank you, at least, I tried.

[Amy Shelton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heartbreaking but equally as heartwarming...love a bit of Danielle Steel.

[Malin Nordbeck · Rating 3 out of 5]

En utmärkt hammockbok!

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely outdated (written 1981), but was the perfect amount of cheesy, unrealistic, and unpredictable.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you haven't seen the 1990s TV movie version or haven't read the print version, if you're a horse lover, you'll love Danielle Steel's Palomino. When Samantha Taylor's husband left her for another woman, it devastated her and left her bereft and heart-broken. She placed her advertising career on hold and sought refuge in a friend's California horse ranch, and lost herself in the daily rigorous hard labor of ranch life. Later, she discovered daily joys, hard work and trusted friends to help her heal. And that's when she met the horse ranch foreman, Tate Jordan. And from there, a heated relationship ensued between Samantha and Tate. When Tate disappeared and Samantha fell from her horse, it changed her life forever... now confined to a wheelchair, she would have to find the courage to begin again. From there, she would deal with the daily battles on the handicapped, she would find new joys and loves, and the adopted child she always wanted. A beautiful and heart-warming romance.

[Melya Waty · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel that I read 8 years ago. The first novel that I read twice. The weird thing is that the feelings when I read this story hasn't changed. It brings warmth. If Danielle Steel only has 1 single book that she has ever written in her life, then Palomino is enough. Those out there who are nature lovers, who never mind getting their hands dirty, who enjoys sweating under the sun working for what you believe is right, who wants to love and be loved despite all the defects... This is one story that you should not neglect.

[Maria Sanigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three years of heartaches, love, pain, faith, and friendship were tested in this story. Each and every sorrow and happiness was detailed in this very special book. This was -and still is- the kind of book that will make one's faith and ability to love come alive with the challenges, the pains, and a large dose of REALITY.

Palomino - a beautiful book about eternal love and life.

GOD BLESS, READERS!

[Kea · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story was quite nice and I loved the plot turns and twists. I would have given 5 stars if it weren't for the glorification of the author regarding the main characters. Apart from Tate being a quite narrow-minded egocentric man (the toxic hero here), Sam being astonishingly beautiful and Timmy being way to mature for his age and experiences, I would have love to see more character development and therefore a different ending for Sam and Tate.

[Ana Mengual · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un libro que me ha encantado. Me gusta como Steel va contando todo y como se va desarrollando la historia. Es un libro que te hace reflexionar mucho.

[Pippa Lear · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this! There were lots of twists and turns, I absolutely loved the ending. The main character was really likeable and I had a lot of empathy for her situation. I used to really love books about ranches and horses so much when I was younger so this story was right up my alley 😅

[Stephanie Abelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story! Once again Danielle Steel has ripped my heart out and pieced it back together. Loved it!

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a drawn-out plot which I loved. Sam was a great main character and her willingness to (eventually) pick herself up after each an every hardship she faces is admirable. I hated the way she was treated by men in this book especially by those who claimed to love her. The setting of a ranch was idyllic and I was transported there so vividly when I read it.

[Notserp2002 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this - another I read years ago & don't remember.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review was written in that dim corridor of days between the 22nd and 28th of October, 2025 — a week blurred by the hiss of oxygen and the slow drip of IV lines at Bellona Nursing Home & Diagnostic Centre Pvt. Ltd. I was then a reluctant guest of illness, recovering from an infection that had seized both lungs and kidneys. Forgive, therefore, the infrequent tremor in my language; it bears the soft delirium of painkillers and the fragile clarity of a mind half-dreaming between fever and thought.

Palomino opens not with catastrophe, but with aftermath. It is a book about the silences that follow a broken marriage, the internal ruins that remain invisible to the world. In The Ring, history was the enemy; in Palomino, it is time itself — time as a quiet devastator, eroding belief, thinning joy, leaving only the echo of what once shimmered.

The heroine, Samantha Taylor, is a photographer and ex-wife, poised somewhere between freedom and loss. She travels west, to a horse ranch, and finds in its landscape the blurred contours of redemption.

Reading Palomino while convalescing at Bellona, I found the ranch merging with the sterile geometry of my hospital ward — both spaces of enforced stillness, where the body is asked to listen to itself. The horses became metaphors for breath; their steady rhythms mimicked the ventilator’s mechanical rise and fall. And like Samantha, I too was learning to trust my body again after betrayal — hers by love, mine by infection.

Steel, in this novel, writes with deceptive clarity. Beneath the clean surface lies an ocean of semiotic shifts. Barthes would say that the language of love is always already written — that every confession repeats a prior code. But Steel, through Samantha, tries to rewrite that code in feminine syntax.

The male absence in Palomino—the husband gone, the lover uncertain — allows her protagonist to occupy a space Kristeva might call the chora: a pre-symbolic, nurturing silence where identity regenerates.

I remember circling one line: “She felt herself dissolve into the vastness of the land.” It’s the dissolution of the “I” that fascinates me — not destruction, but expansion. Steel, perhaps unintentionally, approaches mysticism here. Samantha’s self does not die; it diffuses.

In Derrida’s sense, she becomes a trace — not a presence, but an ongoing difference. The open plains allow her to unlearn the structures that confined her — marriage, career, control — and enter a looser, more fluid temporality.

The novel’s title, Palomino, is itself a metonym — the golden horse that embodies strength, grace, endurance. Yet it is also a textural word, shimmering between color and creature. It names a threshold between the animate and the aesthetic, just as Steel’s novel oscillates between story and symbol.

The horse becomes an emblem of the body restored — muscle, motion, breath. Reading this while recovering, I felt that symbol sharply: the longing to move again, to return to the vividness of the physical world.

Steel’s sentimental tone, often dismissed as cliché, acquires here a strange gravitas. There is something almost phenomenological about her attention to gesture — the hand brushing a mane, the sunlight on skin, the pulse of hooves. It’s through these sensory details that Samantha rediscovers agency.

Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse haunts these pages — especially his notion that “to love is to attempt to utter the inutterable.” Steel stages that attempt not through speech but through touch, through work, through the slow domestic choreography of recovery.

There’s a passage where Samantha wakes before dawn and watches the horses moving through mist. The description is pure Steel — lush, cinematic — yet what I hear beneath it is the sound of thought rebuilding itself. The mist is the mind’s own opacity, slowly thinning as light returns. Healing, the novel insists, is not a singular act but a repetition — like the drip of an IV, or the daily feeding of animals. Love, too, must be fed, maintained, and sometimes abandoned for it to be reborn.

Kristeva would see in Palomino the work of the maternal — not as motherhood, but as the generative act of caring for the self. Samantha’s nurturing of horses becomes a mirror for her nurturing of her own fragmented psyche. She learns to inhabit her solitude without fear, to find within it not absence but rhythm.

This is Steel’s subversive quiet: she writes the feminine as cyclical and regenerative, resisting the linear logic of loss and gain.

From my hospital bed, I began to see Palomino less as a romance and more as an allegory of survival. The romantic plot — woman leaves pain, finds love again — is only a scaffold. The real narrative is interior: the reconstitution of being after the collapse of meaning. Derrida’s notion of “différance” floats through every page — the delay between what we were and what we are becoming. Samantha is never fully “healed”; she is perpetually in transition, like the breath between inhalation and exhalation.

There’s a moment near the novel’s end when she tells her new lover, “I don’t need you to save me.” It’s the quietest revolution in Steel’s universe — a rejection of the patriarchal grammar of rescue. Love, here, is not salvation but companionship in imperfection.

And yet, even as Steel writes this, she can’t resist softening the edges with tenderness. Her writing, like the horses she describes, is both wild and disciplined — emotion bridled by form.

I remember glancing at the IV line while reading that passage and thinking: maybe that’s all writing ever is—a way of managing the overflow. Steel’s prose performs containment. It translates excess into narrative. Each chapter reins in pain, loops it into motion, and then releases it again. In that rhythm, I found something oddly consoling — a poetics of endurance.

If The Ring was Steel’s meditation on inherited trauma, Palomino is her hymn to reclamation. It doesn’t deny suffering; it reimagines it as the fertile ground for transformation.

The western landscape, with its vastness and solitude, becomes a metaphor for the postmodern condition — the self as frontier, forever expanding and dissolving. Steel, without theoretical language, gestures toward what we might call the ecology of selfhood: the interdependence of loss and renewal, memory and motion.

In those late October nights, when the nurses dimmed the lights and the hum of machines softened, I would close the book and watch the slow movement of the drip. I thought of Samantha’s quiet strength, her willingness to start again without certainty. The hospital, like her ranch, was both confinement and sanctuary — a space where time loosened and the self could reconfigure.

By the final chapter, Steel offers no grand revelation, only continuity. Samantha rides into a sunrise that feels less like an ending and more like a pulse — a return to life’s basic rhythm. That’s the genius of Palomino: its wisdom lies in repetition, in the acceptance that recovery is a verb, not a state.

When I finished the novel, I felt as though I had been breathing with it — slow, deliberate, grateful. The world outside my window was pale with dawn. Somewhere a horse whinnied in memory. I realised that the book, like illness, had taught me patience — that strange, sacred art of waiting until the heart’s noise quiets and we can hear the soft thud of our own becoming.

And so I close this reflection with gratitude — to Steel, for her unembarrassed sentimentality; to Barthes, Kristeva, and Derrida, for whispering through her pages; and to that pale golden horse named Palomino, who carries both Samantha and me toward the same horizon — where grief and grace finally blur into one continuous, breathing light.

Try it. You'll love it in all probability.

[Keeley Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn't put this down and read it in a day, brilliant read

[Mitch C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Late review.

Good read. As always, DS stories are poignant, tragic, with twists here and there...

I remembered the heroine had an accident that left her disabled. And she loves riding horses. But the accident didn't stop her to tend to her farm and animals. Prior to that she was married and was left high and dry by her husband. I vaguely remember also that she's trying to adopt or gain custody of a kid.

When she went away to find her solace at the farm, she met Tate Jordan, a ranch hand. They fell in love but she pushed him away coz' of her disability. The hero later found out though and his love for her didn't fade.

Probably this could also be my first cowboy romance book ever. Nice.

Mentally adding this as one of my rereads.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars, rounded up

Over-the-top melodrama at its best!

Originally published in 1981, Palomino is the first Danielle Steel book that I've read from her classic catalogue. It's epic, gloriously pretentious, and now very dated. But I loved every minute of it.

There's a lot of falling in love and a lot of falling out of love. A lot of horses and a lot of cowboys. A lot of hard-driving, yet kindhearted New York ad executives. A lot of wheelchairs and a lot of television news anchors. And a lot of conflict and pining. Endless pining. It's... a lot.

This book certainly won't appeal to everyone, but if you love romance novels that aren't vulgar, or have an appreciation for the schmaltzy art of a well done soap opera, Palomino is for you.

[Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am just not a fan of romance novels, but I am a HUGE fan of books with a kind of western theme (ranch life, cowboys, cattle drives, horses, etc.) and traditional westerns. This is why, when my mom recommended this book, I had a very open mind about it. I enjoyed the first part, but about halfway through it got annoying and, by the end, I had completely lost interest. I didn't find it believable in the least, and for this genre that is important to me. The characters were a bit generic, especially the high-powered executive who insisted she everything when, in reality, she knew painfully little about how real ranch life works.

[Patty Ventola Donoso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hermosa historia, un poco triste claro, pero eso la hace mas real ya que la vida misma tiene momentos de tristeza sin duda. Pero Danielle Steel logro conmoverme con esta y llevarme al final de la historia con ganas de mas. Buen final para la historia. Por momentos me paso de pensar en que no podía quedar así, que ella lograría recuperarse . Pero en la vida real los problemas son reales y por mas que uno desee, hay cosas que no pueden cambiarse. No es una novela rosa. Si eso buscan, no lo encontraran aquí.
Pero vale cada palabra del mismo.

[Lo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is where I fell of the Steel train. Oh man. sometimes I think when the monkeys aren't writing hamlet, they're writing danielle steel books!

I love those monkeys!