Danielle Steele at it's worst (Daddy - Danielle Steel)

Member Name: thingywhatsit

Product:	Daddy - Danielle Steel
Date:	21/06/07 (497 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None, waste of time reading it.

Disadvantages: Waste of money.

It has been a while since I read any of Danielle Steel. In her earlier books, although she had a good knack of holding a story together, where I felt she failed to gain my attention was that all of her heroines were beautiful people in designer clothing and living amidst the rich. I was neither entertained by it, nor did it appeal to my imagination very much. Having read work, it would never give me food for thought, which is what I expect from any novel that I take the time to read.

Daddy is a strange sort of tale and takes Daniel Steele out of the realms of the rich and famous, though into male perspective to a certain degree, since the main character within the story is Oliver Watson, a man who believes that the life he has built for himself and his family is perfect, until one decision on the part of his wife changes both his perception of the world, and throws his life into a turmoil of questions, to which the answers are not obvious.

Having been married to Oliver for 18 years, his wife, Sarah decides that the time has come when she needs to put her family to one side and to follow her dream to study leaving the children in the care of their father to study for a Master's Degree at Harvard.

Although there is a central theme of fatherhood throughout the story in the lives of Oliver, his son and his father, what makes the story so irritating is that the most interesting characters within the framework of the story are those that appear from nowhere outside of the main framework of the story. The other characters within the family are frankly boring and add little to what could have become an epic. The son, Benjamin showed a little bit of independent character within the book, and the grandfather, George Watson seemed a very sad characterization and probably bore more resemblance to how a reader would see an old man of seventy, though neither really stood off the page more than as characters half painted, or in black and white drawing with no coloring in.

Taking the reader through the adventures and growing up of children without their mother's influence in the home is pretty unrealistically dealt with, and the old habit of introducing rich people into her stories seems to be a trademark of Steele, touching only briefly on those characters with very little intelligence and even less money, almost as if the author had no understanding at all about the moral fibre of those people less fortunate than those portrayed in the book that can afford the life of luxury. Even in dealing with the modest surroundings of Sarah after she leaves her husband, Steele's lack of substance and detail in even understanding any poverty aspects of life is disappointing at best and makes me wonder if the writer needs a touch of humility to even come to grasps with the reality that there are indeed different classes of people within the world and that life doesn't begin and end in the rich America that makes up the American dream.

It's a great shame because Danielle Steele does have a good style and is very readable, though this book didn't give me any real enjoyment and going through the chapters towards the end was a vain attempt to find substance that really wasn't there. Made into a film starring Patrick Duffy in 1991, I suspect that the film version was probably better than the written word.

My advice to Danielle Steele fans and readers wanting to experience her work ? Buy her earlier work where her passion showed, and forget about trying to find harsh reality within the covers of her books. At least the earlier ones had some element of structure and story telling that merited the price of a paperback.

This one doesn't.


Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Dell; Reissue edition (October 1, 1990)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0440207622
ISBN-13: 978-0440207627



On sale from £5.00 from Amazon, go for Full Circle as a preference, since it will offer a better story and finer example of Danielle Steele's work.

Summary: A book that will head for the nearest car boot sale