In her 41st novel (Special Delivery, p. 751, etc.), Steel weaves
touches of the paranormal into a historical romance. Charlie
Waterston's marriage is kaput. His perfect wife of ten years
suddenly tells him that their life has been empty and that she
wants a divorce. In shock, Charlie - an American architect working
in London - returns to the States and takes a six-month sabbatical
to recover. Out on the road on a snowy night just before Christmas,
he takes shelter at a bed and breakfast in Shelburne Falls,
Massachusetts. He and the owner (one of Steel's benevolent older
women) really hit it off. She then offers to rent him a house
bequeathed to her by her grandmother: a perfect small chateau on a
nearby lake built in 1790 for Sarah Ferguson, the Countess of
Balfour, by her lover Francois de Pellerin, a virile French count
who spent much of his time on the frontier with Indians. Sarah, who
had been badly abused by her husband, and had given birth to
several dead babies, ran away to America to make a new life.
Charlie begins to read her journals, and one night, entering his
bedroom, he believes that he sees her ghost. Steel parallels
chapters about Sarah's ordeal with the Earl of Balfour and her love
affair with Pellerin, with chapters about Charlie's romance with
Francesca Vironnet, a modern-day historian emotionally damaged by a
bad marriage. Charlie finds Sarah's journals to have a hypnotic
rhythm and a story so captivating that "he wanted to sit in one
spot until he finished all of them" - a description of a style that
sounds a lot like Steel's, or at least what she intends. No amount
of spellbinding rhythm can make up for an overlong romance. Despite
the usual Steelian menu of love, pain, and compassion, most fans
will figure out the ending long before they get to it - and could
probably supply the cadences as well. (Kirkus Reviews)
In The Ghost, Danielle Steel has brilliantly interwoven past and present in a timeless novel of courage, history and love.
With a wife he loves and an exciting London-based career, Charles Waterston is quite unprepared for the sudden end to his ten-year marriage - and his unwanted transfer to the New York office. With nothing left to lose, and with Christmas approaching, Charlie takes leave of absence and drives through New England, hoping to make peace with himself. A sudden, blinding snowstorm strands him in a small town, where an elderly widow offers to rent him an exquisite lakeside chateau hidden deep in the woods. From the moment he sets foot inside, Charlei feels the presence of Sarah, the beautiful young woman who lived and died there two centuries ago - and on Christmas Eve, he glimpses her for the first time. At first he thinks it is a trick, until he finds her diaries hidden away in an old trunk and, as he turns the brittle, dusty pages and learns more about Sarah, she starts to come alive for him.
From her arrival in America in 1789, Sarah writes of her harrowing flight from England and her determination to start a new life in the vast new world. She meets a French nobleman who transforms her life, and their fateful union has a love so powerful that it reaches across the centuries. Her story gives Charlie the courage to let go of his past, and the freedom to grasp a future that is right before his eyes.
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