#110 Family Ties by Danielle Steel

Family Ties: A Novel


Well this review is a few weeks late, but better late than never right?

From http://www.bn.com/:

Annie Ferguson was a bright young Manhattan architect. Talented, beautiful, just starting out with her first job, new apartment and boyfriend, she had the world in the palm of her hand — until a single phone call altered the course of her life forever. Overnight, she became the mother to her sister’s three orphaned children, keeping a promise she never regretted making, even if it meant putting her own life indefinitely on hold.



Now, at forty-two, as independent as ever, with a satisfying career and a family that means everything to her, Annie is comfortable being single and staying that way. She appears to have no time for anything else. With her nephew and nieces now young adults and confronting major challenges of their own, Annie is navigating a parent’s difficult passage between lending them a hand and letting go, and suddenly facing an empty nest. The eldest, twenty-eight-year-old Liz, an overworked, struggling editor in a high-powered job at Vogue, has never allowed any man to come close enough to hurt her. Ted, at twenty-four a serious and hardworking law student, is captivated by a much older, much more experienced woman with children, who is leading him much further than he wants to go. And the youngest, twenty-one-year-old Katie — impulsive, artistic, rebellious — is an art student about to make a choice that will lead her to an entirely different world she is in no way prepared for but determined to embrace.


Then, just when least expected, a chance encounter changes Annie’s life yet again in the most unexpected direction of all.


From Manhattan to Paris and all the way to Tehran, Family Ties is a novel that reminds us how challenging and unpredictable life can be, and that the powerful bonds of family are the strongest of all.
 
This was better than some of her books of late.  To be honest she was the first author I religiously followed and in fact I own almost, if not all of her books.  But for the past five years or so they had begun to bore me, they are all the same formula.  This one too follows the formula, but it was more interesting than some of her other recent books.
 
I liked the premise that a woman's life is turned upside down when she suddenly becomes the mother to her two nieces and her nephew.  Of course as in a lot of her books, money is not an issue, but there are other real struggles.  I do think she could have done more justice to the struggles of adjusting.  This book was more about how the three children although pretty much grown were all having problems at the same time.  I don't think it really dealt with the fact that she wasn't their real mother.  Of course in some ways that was part of the story that even though she wasn't biologically their mother, she was their mother of their heart.
 
Boy this is one of my worst nightmares is to suddenly after having no children being forced to raise my brother's children.  With my nieces and nephews I am in a great spot, I get to be the fun one.  While I try to offer advice if I can and if its wanted, at the end of the day I'm the fun aunt. 
 
So I would give this book probably a C.  It was better than some of her recent ones, but still predictable.  You could see everything that happened coming a mile away.