Book Review: Until the End of Time by Danielle Steel

Until the End of Time: A Novel by Danielle Steel
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
Hardcover, 336 pages
ISBN: 9780345530882




My Review:
It's been at least a few years since I've picked up a Danielle Steel though I use to read her voraciously when I was a teenager. Somehow Until the End of Time's blurb appealed to me and I reserved it from the library.

Again I will remind my readers I read for pure pleasure, not to deconstruct sentence structure or how the writer writes. All I really want is a good story, however if a writer can't hold my interest I can't read the story. So with that in mind I will move forward with my review. I know a lot of people don't like Danielle Steel, but she holds a special place in my heart as one of the first novelists I read. No her newer stories aren't quite like the sweeping stories of old, but I still see some of the old Danielle Steel in her books.

Until the End of Time took a little to get into. The reading was just a little stilted at the beginning of each story in the book (it is divided into two separate yet connected love stories). But I felt like once she got into her rhythm, Ms. Steel really began to shine and I fell into the stories then. This is not a complex book, but after reading a few more complex young adult novels I think this is just what I needed. An easy breezy adult pleasure novel. Love stories pure and simple. And while they are very emotional and deal with sensitive subjects, I never felt too bogged down. I kept flipping the pages to find out what would happen next. I connected with the characters, I felt their joy and their pain. And I enjoyed the plot. I read most of the book in one sitting as well. Yes, that is the Danielle Steel I remember. Getting swept away into the story, losing track of time and just enjoying the read. I did that last night and enjoyed it. I won't apologize for my guilty pleasure. Was it the best book ever? No. Was it enjoyable for the moment? Yes. Simple enough. Go forth and read it if you want, feel free to ignore me to on this one if you want as well. We all have our guilty pleasures and we all should enjoy them :)

Have a great day! And Mitchell Fulcher, I will love you until the end of time . . .

My rating: 4.0/5.0

About the Book:
Two couples, four decades apart. One believes that if lovers die, they find each other again in another life. Or perhaps they wind up as stars side by side in the sky, together forever. Who knows how it really ends? Danielle Steel breaks new ground in her career as a perennial New York Times bestseller with the poignant story of two parallel destinies, and the kind of love we all hope will be everlasting.

UNTIL THE END OF TIME

Bill, a dedicated young lawyer working at his family’s prestigious New York firm, leaves everything he trained for to follow his dream and become a minister in rural Wyoming. Jenny, his wife, is a stylist whose heart and soul are invested in fashion. She leaves the milieu and life she loves to join him. The certainty they share is that their destinies are linked forever.

Fast forward thirty-eight years. Robert is a hardworking independent book publisher in Manhattan who has given up all personal life to build his struggling business. He is looking for one big hit novel to publish. Lillibet is a young Amish woman, living as though in the seventeenth century, caring for her widowed father and three young brothers on their family farm. In secret at night, by candlelight, she has written the novel that burns within her, and gets it into Robert’s hands, wrapped in her hand-stitched apron. He falls in love first with the book, and then with the woman he has never met, living in the sequestered world of the Amish—a world without telephones, computers, electricity, modern conveniences, or cars. Although Lillibet faces banishment from her family and community, she embraces the opportunity to publish her novel, and is irresistibly drawn to the man who has heard her voice. Destiny is at work here. Fate draws her from her horse-and-buggy life toward his, and the publication of her novel.

In the hands of master storyteller Danielle Steel, these two remarkable relationships come together in unexpected and surprising ways, as lovers are lost, and find each other again. If it is true that real love lasts forever and lovers cannot lose each other, then Until the End of Time will not only comfort and fascinate us, as destiny does her dance, but it will give us hope as well. Love and fate are powerful, irresistible forces, as Steel proves to us here, in a book about courage, change, risk, and hope . . . and love that never dies.

About the Author (from Goodreads):
Since 1981, Ms. Steel has been a permanent fixture on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestseller lists. In 1989, she was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having at least one of her books on the Times bestseller list for 381 consecutive weeks. But Guinness was premature. The fact is that one or more of Ms. Steel's novels have been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 390 consecutive weeks.

From an education in New York and Europe to a professional background in public relations and advertising, and teaching, Ms. Steel moved on quickly to her literary career and has been hard at work writing ever since. She wrote her first book at nineteen. Often, she works on five books at a time — researching one storyline, writing another, and editing the third. Still, she often spends two to three years researching and developing a single project. In the heat of a first draft, it is not uncommon for her to spend eighteen to twenty hours a day glued to her 1946 Olympia manual typewriter.

Family, children, and young people are the central focus of her life, and her passion, which frequently shows in her writing. She deals with the themes that touch on the most pressing issues of real life, which makes her books universal, and touch so many people. She is fascinated by the pressing life situations that affect us all, how people handle them and are often transformed as a result. And her novels have explored subjects such as kidnapping, incest, mental illness, suicide, death, divorce, adoption, marriage, loss, cancer, war, among others. She also frequently writes about historical themes, shedding new light on familiar historical events with meticulously accurate research.

Website
Facebook
Twitter
Blog

***I received this book from my wonderful library for my own personal reading. ***