Loving by Danielle Steel

For my next book review, I am reviewing a book by one of my favorite romance authors. While it not by any means a serious book or a book that will make you think about important topics, it is light hearted and entertaining to read.

Synopsis: This is a book about Bettina Daniels. She was raised in a very luxurious and wealthy household by her father, author Justin Daniels. Her mother died when she was very young. When Bettina was only eighteen years old, her father died of a heart attack and left her in debt and alone.

Her father’s friend, sixty-two years old Ivo Stewart, took Bettina in and rescued her from her debt and married her. This was her first husband. He ended up filing for divorce in order to allow Bettina to be with someone her own age and have the opportunity to have children.

Her second husband was Anthony, a British actor who married her in order to get his green card. She got pregnant with his child but lost the baby.

 Next, Bettina married John Fields, a doctor from San Francisco. They had a son together named Alexander. He left her after she wrote a play and had it put on Broadway because he believed her place was to be at home with her husband and child.

Her final husband was Oliver Paxton, and they had a daughter together named Antonia and he also died of a heart attack.

Review:

After reading this book, I have several thoughts about this book. There are several themes I noticed while reading this book.

The first theme is Bettina learning how to become herself and not someone else everyone expected her to be. 

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. You become it takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand but once you are real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.’

What this quote means is that over time Bettina learns to become her own person and fulfill her own dreams of being a playwright and writer and not the person her father or her husbands expected her to be. This is very relatable and something that happens to all of us as we grow older and become adults.

The next theme that stood out to me was Bettina trying to blend in and be the person her third husband expected her to be instead of being her own person.

“We all lead boring, ordinary, mundane existences, and now and then a bird of paradise comes along, and we all get scared. It scares us because we’re not like that, our feathers aren’t brilliantly hued in red and green, we’re brown and gray, and seeing that kind of paradise makes us feel ugly, or as in some way we’ve failed.” Some of us love to watch that bird, and we dream that one day we might be birds of paradise too.”

In this scene Bettina’s friend Mary is telling her that in hiding her past and in trying to be something she is not; she is doing herself a disservice. There was definitely a time in my past when I tried to blend in and was not entirely comfortable with who I was. As I grew older, I became more confident in who I was and what I had to offer people.

The final quote that stood out for me was “She was not her father’s or Ivo’s or Ollie’s anymore, she was her own now, and he understood that, just as she knew it about him.”

What this quote means to me is that Bettina finally realizes that she is her own person and has finally become real.