Carey Henderson's Reviews > Granny Dan

I'll start off with the positives: the storyline kept my attention enough for me to finish the novels & I liked the epilogue.

That about sums up my positives.

I have a very, very hard time liking a novel where adultery is justified (if you've read my past book reviews you'll notice a pattern concerning that topic). Even if the book is fantastic, when the author tries to convince the reader that the character's love affair was okay because...such & such...it's a dealbreaker for me.

Having lost my own Grandma very recently, I loved the idea of your Grandma having a past before you came into the picture. Danielle Steel hit it right on the mark when she wrote that, "as grandchildren, you always think of your grandparents as old, you forget that they were young once." So very true! This book is a good reminder to anyone that has grandparents still alive, to listen to their stories & find out who they were before even your parents were a thought in their mind. Once they're gone, their stories are gone too.

I like Danielle Steel (obviously, I've read quite a few of her novels), but you can tell this was one of her earlier books. I know the novel wasn't about the granddaughter, but I would've liked her character developed a little more. I didn't get a "feel" for who she was before the novel jumped right into Granny Dan's story & the only time she re-appeared was in the epilogue to sum up what happened after Granny Dan came to America. It was an easy novel to figure out, of course the prologue gave most of it away, but there wasn't any big surprises. And I kind of like surprises in my novels.

Danina, aka Granny Dan, was more sick & needed more emergency doctor care than anybody I've ever heard of (I guess read of :)...everytime you turned a page she was facing some kind of life or death medical disaster that needed her adulturous lover/doctor to come rescue her out of. That got annoying. And I'm so tired of reading romanc-y novels where one character is being unfaithful to their spouse....seriously??? That must be the only way to be romantic nowadays is to be an adulterer. I found it kind of creepy that Nikolai kept talking about how beautiful & "childlike" Danina was (after all he was 20yrs older than her 19yr old self)...anytime a guy refers to his lover as having a childlike body & personality...creepy! Even if she is legal. And Danielle Steel wrote Nikolai's wife to be so hard-nosed, boring, blah blah blah...in order to justify his affair with Danina, annoyed me! I was pretty much appaled by the whole situation.

Overall, I would not recommend this book UNLESS you enjoy reading fiction novels with the backdrop of wartime Russia during the early 20th century. Personally, I don't know anything about that time period in Russian history so the political events, political figures & war battles that were taking place I had zero knowledge of & couldn't even understand the big names, let alone pronounce if I had to, the names/events that were dropped.

3/5 stars.... :)