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Let me start by saying that I think the last time I read a Danielle Steel book I was pregnant with my son and he is now 32 years old. I couldn’t tell you which book, but as I recall, it was an entertaining read but not much more than that.

My library patrons read her all the time and she has gone the way of many popular writers, spinning out several books a year. This one came up on a site I use to get digital review copies so I thought I’d give it a try.

I hated this book so much I’m not sure why I finished it, other than I fell back on an old bad habit of reading to the end in hopes it would get better. It didn’t.

I’ll start with the beginning. I’ve gone to a lot of writing conferences over the years, as a reader and a fan, and I’ve often heard writers talk about showing, not telling in their work. This book is a prime example of why that is. The first chunk, maybe 25-30% of the book, was a litany of people and places and their history. The people are Christophe and Joy, who meet, fall in love, build a winery, have a daughter they name Camille, and have a pretty perfect life. This covers 20 years.

Camille has just graduated Stanford and is happy to be home, working in the vineyard with her mother. Joy runs the business side of things, Christophe, along with his vineyard manager Cesare, run the winery side of things. More perfection. Only problem with perfection is that it’s boring. Camille and her parents get along beautifully, although Camille has no social life, because after all, working in the business and spending time with her parents is all any 20something wants out of life.

Yawn.

Eventually, some drama creeps in and Joy dies, and shortly after that the extremely happily married but now devastated Christophe meets a predator, the Countess Maxine, a highly skilled gold-digger whom he marries, waiting just past the one year anniversary of his beloved wife’s death, out of respect of course. Camille realizes that Maxine is not the kind woman her mother was, but her father is blinded by naivete and – wait for it – lust.

More tragedy occurs, and the evil stepmother, along with her two evil sons, are now making Camille’s life miserable. Luckily, friend of the family Sam and his son Phillipe step in to help. Camille and Phillipe grew up together, but he is seven years older than her so they’ve always had this brother-sister relationship.

Then as if the perfect life wasn’t enough of a fairy tale, Steel borrows heavily and heavy-handedly from the Cinderella story. The evil stepmother goes to the ball, and Camille’s “fairy grandmother” makes sure she goes, too, stealing her a dress and even lending her sparkly shoes to wear. The ultimately happy ending comes out of nowhere and didn’t make any sense to me for reasons that would give away the weak story altogether.

If you, dear reader, decide to read this book, I would love to hear from you. I can’t wait to talk to my library patrons about it, I am dying to know if anyone likes it. The early reviews on Amazon are wonderful, for the most part, which just confused me.

I was thoroughly disgusted by the end, more with myself for sticking with it and wasting two and a half hours of my life that I’ll never get back, but also with the ridiculous ending. Did I mention that I hated this book?

10/17 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch™

FAIRYTALE by Danielle Steel. Delacorte Press (October 10, 2017). ISBN 978-1101884065. 288p.

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Zevin’s last novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, is one of my favorite books ever. I heard about it from the publisher who just raved and I’m so sorry to say that he is now retired (thank you, Michael Rockliff, I still miss your recommendations!) So I was pretty excited about a new book from this author. Then I saw it made the top of the Library Reads List which is always a good sign. But with all my expectations, I was bound to be disappointed and I kinda was.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a very good book. One chapter in I was recommending my library try and get the author to visit. I knew the first chapter’s name alone, “Bubbe Meise”, would be of interest to my library patrons, as would the Jewish mother and the setting of Miami Beach and Boca Raton.

So the Jewish mother has a college age daughter, Aviva Grossman, who is interning for a local congressman, who was their neighbor at one time. Aviva ends up having an affair with the congressman, gets caught and ostracized. Think Monica Lewinsky on a smaller scale. Or more likely, Donna Rice if you are old enough to remember that scandal. He, of course, survives with his job and family intact, but she cannot get a job. Such is life.

Then Aviva finds out she’s pregnant. She moves to a small town in Maine, changes her name to Jane Young, becomes a party planner, and raises her very precocious daughter Ruby herself. And when she runs for Mayor of the small town, her opponent digs up the dirt on her and Ruby figures out who she really is and who she thinks her father is.

The point of view shifts between Aviva’s mother, the congressman’s wife, young Aviva, Jane Young, and Ruby. I was not a fan of the second person voice at one point, nor of the “choose your own adventure” device that crops up that other readers seem to love. Political scandal always makes for good reading, and the perspective from the woman’s side of things is less judgmental and more realistic, especially among the various ages of the women telling the story. The family dynamics here also ring true, and the story is told with a lot of humor, which I loved.

I totally related to the mother more than the daughter, but the characters weren’t as developed as I expected. It appears that Zevin grew up here in South Florida and I would guess maybe still has family here. So while I didn’t love this book like I loved the Fikry book, it’s not really a fair comparison since that book was about a bookstore and my readers know my predilection for that setting! If you like scandal-laced, humorous family stories, (and I do,) then I highly recommend it.

8/17 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch™

YOUNG JANE YOUNG by Gabrielle Zevin. Algonquin Books (August 22, 2017).  ISBN 978-1616205041. 320p.

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