Magic - Danielle Steel

So, Danielle Steel is evidently one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.  Up there with, you know, William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie.  She's the best-selling living author.  She's written like a hundred and fifty books.  All I have to say for this is...I guess it's the sheer volume of book she's written that's selling, because the quality certainly isn't there.

The premise of this book--a group of people meets in Paris every year, has a pop-up dinner at a famous monument, and then departs, with the story following a group of friends over the course of a year between one dinner and the next--sounded interesting.  Action heavy, no, but with plenty of room for character-driven drama.  And I remember my mom having so many Danielle Steel books on her shelves when I was little...surely there must be a reason for that!  So I was expecting a decent amount here.  Not the world, but a decent story with good characters and solid writing.

I didn't get it.  While there is character-driven drama, it's petty and superficial and the writing is that of a first draft.  Clearly, when you're putting out three or four books a year, you don't have much time to polish them, and I guess people just let this awful writing go by with the excuse of, "Oh well, it's Danielle Steel, it's fine!"  It is not fine.  Comma splices abound here, sentences are redundant, and the story is all tell and no show.  None of the characters have any depth to them at all.  The whole thing has a very superficial feel to it despite what could have been some very heart-wrenching or uplifting story lines.  As it was, I couldn't really bring myself to care about any of the six main characters.  This is, at its heart, a book about Rich People Problems, but its not a good one.  Stories about Rich People Problems can actually be very funny, or very humanizing.  This wasn't any of it.  While some characters here were in really awful situations--one woman's husband leaves her for his twenty-four-year-old model girlfriend, and the woman is left trying to juggle their huge business with the dissolution of their marriage; another couple faces upheaval in their marriage when an amazing job offer threatens to pull the husband halfway around the world for three years--the writing made them come off as more whiny than genuinely troubled or torn, and that's rather disappointing to me.

I read this book for a reading challenge category (a best-seller from 2016) and honestly I can't see myself reading anything else by Steel based on the experience here.  It has a startlingly high rating (3.9/5) on Goodreads, given the extremely poor quality...but then, people went crazy for Fifty Shades of Gray too, didn't they?  Reviews seem to largely consist of "Oh, it's a fun summer/beach/weekend read, very light!" but being light, or a summer or beach read, and being good are not mutually exclusive, nor should they be.

2 star out of 5.

Touch Of Power - Maria V. Snyder (Healer #1)

I actually had to double check that this book was by Maria V. Snyder because, uhm, what happened to her writing?  I adore her first novel, Poison Study, though I adored its sequels slightly less, and while I haven't read the Glass series or the Insider duo, I was looking forward to this one.  I just don't understand what happened!  The book was a sloppy mess, and Snyder's writing seems to have de-matured between Poison Study and Touch of Power.  Touch of Power just seemed like a slapdash collection of plot elements, including:

-flower that may or may not be able to kill you
-eleven types of magic, many of which seem to contradict   each other and none of which are properly explained
-multiple princes
-a religious cult
-fifteen realms, one of which randomly has a president that is very out of place
-way too many caves
-a plague that kills anyone who tries to cure it
-a missing sibling
-zombies
-a romance that doesn't really ring true

So.  While I liked how healing magic works in Touch of Power, with a healer assuming an injured/sick person's maladies and then healing herself by just getting better ten times faster than a normal person would, that was pretty much the only good part of this book.  Everything else just feels like Snyder cobbled together a bunch of different story lines, any one of which would have made a respectable novel of its own.  It just felt like this wasn't actually the novel Snyder wanted to write.  I couldn't decide if she wanted to write a zombie novel, a school story about the children of powerful/royal families, a book about a plague-ravaged land, a tale of rescuing a lost sibling, a narrative of struggle about coming to terms with a hated power, or a chronicle of trying to bring down an evil king. All of those were present here, and it was just too much.  Not a single aspect was explored fully, leaving the book a hurried rush from one plot element to the next without anything actually being settled.

Additionally, every single one of the characters in this book lacks dimension.  They are all single-faceted, which makes their "growth" come across as false, especially Kerrick.  What was up with that sudden romance?  While it's not insta-romance in the sense that they fall in love right away, when it does happen, it's pretty instantaneous, with no build or maturation of the relationship at all.  And while Avry is a perfectly nice protagonist, she isn't someone you can really root for, because she's not really struggling.  She's just kind of there.  We're just supposed to accept that Avry is Special, and that is why everything goes right for her.

Speaking of that, what was with that ending?  I have NEVER seen a more blatant cop out on explanation.  NEV.  ER.

Overall, while I'm kind of curious as to what Avry &. Co. will get up to next, I'm not curious enough to slog through another of these when there's much better stuff out there.

1.5 stars out of 5.