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3.2 AVERAGE
3.2 AVERAGE
This book was so bad it's got me writing my first review just to warn people off reading it.
First things first, the writing was bad. Now, good writing can sometimes make up for the lack of a good plot and vice versa, however, in this case, you've got a book that's full of cliches and nothing to distract you from noticing that. Quite the contrary, the author seemed intent on REMINDING everyone how unoriginal the plot was. And I mean that literally.
There wasn't a page in this book that didn't include a paragraph recaping the previous page's events for you and every couple of pages you got a recap of EVERYTHING that'd happened so far in the book, and lets also not forget the added bonus of three or four sentences in the SAME paragraph restating the same thing over and over again. It took all of twenty pages for me to start thinking (and wanting to shout) "I know already!!!".
But annoying repetitiveness aside, this book was still awful. There was no structure whatsoever and almost no dialogue. We are told things happen but we never actually SEE them happen. Now, when I took screenwriting classes a couple of months ago, there was this very important rule that our instructor insisted on and which at the time I thought only applied to scriptwriting, but now I can see that Danielle Steel could use: SHOW, don't tell.
This book was supposed to provoke feelings in the reader (or one would assume so, what with characters dying left and right) but in the end I couldn't find it in myself to care about any of the tragedies happening because I simply had not connected with any of the characters.
What's more, in the rare cases that there was dialogue, the author seemed to want to make up for lost time by writing meaningless unrealistic monologues that had the characters- guess what- repeating what we'd already been told an infuriating amount of times.
The book of course ended abruptly, like the author had gotten bored of writing, which it seemed to me she had already been way earlier in it.
In the end, Friends Forever left me wondering only one thing: HOW did Danielle Steel become a best-selling author?
First things first, the writing was bad. Now, good writing can sometimes make up for the lack of a good plot and vice versa, however, in this case, you've got a book that's full of cliches and nothing to distract you from noticing that. Quite the contrary, the author seemed intent on REMINDING everyone how unoriginal the plot was. And I mean that literally.
There wasn't a page in this book that didn't include a paragraph recaping the previous page's events for you and every couple of pages you got a recap of EVERYTHING that'd happened so far in the book, and lets also not forget the added bonus of three or four sentences in the SAME paragraph restating the same thing over and over again. It took all of twenty pages for me to start thinking (and wanting to shout) "I know already!!!".
But annoying repetitiveness aside, this book was still awful. There was no structure whatsoever and almost no dialogue. We are told things happen but we never actually SEE them happen. Now, when I took screenwriting classes a couple of months ago, there was this very important rule that our instructor insisted on and which at the time I thought only applied to scriptwriting, but now I can see that Danielle Steel could use: SHOW, don't tell.
This book was supposed to provoke feelings in the reader (or one would assume so, what with characters dying left and right) but in the end I couldn't find it in myself to care about any of the tragedies happening because I simply had not connected with any of the characters.
What's more, in the rare cases that there was dialogue, the author seemed to want to make up for lost time by writing meaningless unrealistic monologues that had the characters- guess what- repeating what we'd already been told an infuriating amount of times.
The book of course ended abruptly, like the author had gotten bored of writing, which it seemed to me she had already been way earlier in it.
In the end, Friends Forever left me wondering only one thing: HOW did Danielle Steel become a best-selling author?
A decent bathroom read. I wanted something light to read. I am not a great fan of her books.
This was a very good book. I could not put it down. It had me laughing and crying. I thought I knew what would happen next, but it fooled me! I would recommend this book!