Lost and Found

Ooof. I have THOUGHTS.

This was my first Danielle Steel, and it's only from 2019, and I really hope that at some point her writing was better than this, because I can't imagine how this got past an editor, other than perhaps she's just so prolific that, like Stephen King, no one bothers to tell her to rework stuff anymore.

First off, it was so, so ridiculously repetitive. Maddie thinks something, then tells her adult children that thought, then she thinks it again a few pages later. She tells the same damn stories over and over in her own mind and to her children, and then to her love interest too. This book could have been half the length, and it was less than 300 pages in the first place. It still probably would have been too long though, because ...

There is absolutely no character development, for any of the characters. Maddie has no interior life, she just wants to revisit the “ones that got away,” even though they were caught and released for reasons that didn't need to be revisited at all. It's all, she loves her work as a photographer, loves her renovated fire station home, repeat ad nauseum. Nothing ever goes any deeper, and I never had a good reason to relate to or connect to Maddie. There was nothing interesting about her, and there COULD have been.

Plus, I found a better story halfway through, when I realized that I didn't trust Maddie as the narrator of her own story. Her daughter, Milagra, had been afraid to introduce her partner of EIGHT YEARS to her mother, or to let her mother visit her in California. Why? This was not explored at all! What had happened in the past to make Milagra not trust her mother? There's a much more interesting story here that we aren't getting! Same with her son's wife and her other daughter, who is unnecessarily cruel to Maddie. WHAT is going on with this family! Make the setting darker and you've got a story rife for some closet-skeletons!

I also didn't believe Maddie's relationship with William. For most of the beginning of their relationship, she keeps describing their time together as pleasant, and with “interesting topics of conversation” for them both, but we get basically none of the conversations or why either of them is interested in the other. There was so much telling, and absolutely NO showing anywhere in this book.

And finally, it had some weird colonization/racist undertones. As a photographer, Maddie travels all over the world to take photos, but when describing places like India and Pakistan, characters describe them as “uncivilized” and “awful,” and then the big will-they-won't-they story has to do with Maddie's hotel in Pakistan being bombed with absolutely no context as to what is supposed to be going on there at the time, and that bothered me, even though Google news sites indicate that bombings in Islamabad wouldn't have been out of character for the country at the time. But the fact that this useless book flexed that way in order to characterize some assignments as dangerous and others as safe really irritated me.

If this is how all of Steel's books are, then I probably won't read any more of them.

I got this one from my Bookcase Club romance box. (So far I'm 3/3 for disliking the books I got from there.)