Samyann
Just over nine hours of listening, read by Dan John Miller. Winners is typical Danielle Steel, sappy-sweet. Let a young adult or teen enjoy. You’ll be confronted with the completely unbelievable Pollyannaism premise of this story. Bad things happen early on: an Olympic skier is paralyzed for life; a young doctor is widowed, a man’s suicide is interrupted with a phone call. No spoilers there, this all happens right out of the chute. Beyond these tragedies the story is one heart warming wonderful event following another … over, and over, and over again, ad nauseum. The expected five stages of grief, denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance, are all pretty much ignored in Winners. There is a bit of denial-anger on the part of the skier’s father, but that’s about it. You’ll jump directly to happy acceptance and skip along through bizarrely far-fetched fairy-tale circumstances. No doubt you’ll run across very ‘happy’ adjective imaginable. Who’s the absurdly rich character? The skier’s father. Who’s the strong, independent woman? The widow. There ya go, the Steel formula! Everybody’s eyes “fill with tears”, too!
My opinion about male readers of romance novels hasn’t changed. Just no. Steel’s books are chic-lit-beach-reads and the audiobook formats are almost always read by men, sadly. Miller is okay, but the female voices are just …. *sigh*. Romance written by a woman, from the point of view of a woman, read by a man, is just silly.
If you are a fan of Steel’s incurably-romantic-pipe-dream bent on reality, you’ll love the book. Otherwise, you’ll roll your eyes and likely not finish.
