Sunday, April 15, 2018

Fairytale & The Right Time




Wine And Thorns

The very prolific  (164 books and counting!) Danielle Steel’s new novel, Fairytale is about a modern-day Cinderella, who has to deal with a vicious stepmother and two nasty stepbrothers.

In her usual rushed style, Steel races through the romance and marriage of Christophe and Joy Lamennais, their setting up of a successful winery in the Napa Valley and the birth of their daughter Camille.

It is interesting to read about how the business of wines, and life among the vinters of the region, their connections and traditions—apart from Christophe, there is his best friend Sam, his wife Barbara and son Phillip.

Soon, Joy dies of cancer, and Barbara does too. Camille throws herself into the work of running the winery and supporting her grieving and lonely father. Then, into the tightly knit social circle of the Valley, comes the glamorous French widow, Maxine de Pantin.

She makes a play for Sam, who is not taken in by her charm, but Christophe is bewitched. She uses her polished seduction techniques to hook him and before he knows it, she is married to him and installed in the chateau that Camille’s parents has built with such love.  She gets her tentacle into the business and summons her wastrel sons, Alexandre and Gabriel to the Lamennais home and starts throwing her weight and her new husband’s money around.

Like the evil stepmother of the classic fairytale, she is horrid to Camille and does everything she can to get her hands on the chateau and the winery. The fairy godmother turns out to be Maxine’s own delightfully French mother, the independent and plain-speaking Simone.

In popular bestsellers there is usually no veering away from the formula so Maxine’s unsavoury past is exposed and her spoilt, greedy sons defeated; it is interesting and funny to read how.  This one has more plot and substance than some of Steel’s other recent books—a quick and entertaining read.

Fairytale
By Danielle Steel
Publisher: PanMacmillan
Pages: 288


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Jagged Edge

Just before Fairytale, Danielle Steel’s The Right Time was released—about Alexandra Window, who has a talent for writing crime novels. Because her single and sexist father tell her, “If you’re going to write mystery books, you’ll either have to write cozy mysteries, like a woman called Agatha Christie, or if you write crime stories like I and a lot of men read, you should probably do it under a man’s name,” that’s what she does. She writes bestselling crime fiction under the name of Alexander Green, and insists that her agent and publisher keep her real identity a secret. She has to go to great lengths to cover up for the lie; when one of the books is turned into a film, she has to pretend to the assistant of the eccentric, reclusive writer.

She gets used to the double life over her time of studying, working, travelling and meeting very unsuitable men.  Again, Steel rushes through the story without much character development, and one never sees a sample of these wonderful chart-busting thriller Alexander/a writes, one simply has to take Steel’s word for it, that the books are suitably ‘manly’ to fool the most perceptive reader. But all this subterfuge for what purpose? Once she has proved herself there seems to be no reason for Alexander to remain ‘male’.  Like all Steel books, this one too can be read in one sitting.




The Right Time
By Danielle Steel
Publisher: PanMacmillan
Pages: 336


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