The Ghost. Danielle Steel. Dell Publishing, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing. New York, NY. 1997.

Book review by Joel
A friend of mine gave me this book and told me to read it. She said it was very good, and not the typical Steel novel. Okay, I read it. And I liked it. I almost hate to admit it. If you read it realize that it is not really about a ghost. It is more about broken relationships and the mourning that we go through to move on. There is a ghost in the book, but this isn’t a King novel. I was hoping for an intra spectral sex scene, but it just didn’t pan out. I really read this book to see if Tracey of Book Reader's Traverse will review her “trash romance” novels. We could do dueling book reviews. Who knows.

I do have to say Danielle Steel is guilty of plot manipulation and predictable pacing. Ho hum. It was a fun read. I was rooting for the wee little girl, who liked Charlie (the main character), and wanted him to like her mom. The mom starts out as a real B----, but softens to Charlie’s incessant wooing and harrumphing. Poor Charlie’s relationship to his wife fell apart when his wife had an affair with Simon, an older man who knew exactly what Charlie’s wife needed in her life. So….Bam!!!!! She leaves him and moves in with him. After a short time she asks for a divorce and then Chuck moves back to New York. He quits his job and moves again to upper state New York. In an overt plot spin, he stopped in a blizzard and asked if he could stay till the storm cleared. At which point, they have pity banter and feel sorry for one another.

I am not going to say anymore about the book. It is a good book to read when in the airport or curling up next to a fireplace, or in a DNA lab while extracting samples for chicken pods. I really wish Danielle would have let her characters all have weird spectral relations with each other. Literature needs more diversity in that area.

Joel.