Answered Prayers by Danielle Steel

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The story
Faith, which is the main character in this book, has a life that seems perfect. She lives in New York, she still has her beautiful looks, she’s smart, she is married to a successful investment banker (Alex) and her children have moved out and they live excellent lives. Faith has deeper problems that she thinks she has overcome. But at her stepfather’s funeral, which Alex didn’t come to so he could support Faith, she is reminded of the very painful memories from her childhood. At the funeral she meets her brother Jack´s best friend from his childhood, Brad Patterson, and the two of them decide to keep in touch. Brad is a now a busy lawyer in San Francisco, California, and they starts e-mailing and calling each other.
Faith has a dream – to have a career of her own, so she is thinking about attending law-school. She tells Brad who thinks it’s a terrific idea and she got his full support, but then when she tells Alex he just laughs at her and tells her that it’s a stupid idea because he needs her at home, to cook and clean for him. Faith ignores him and sends off for brochures about the local schools. At Thanksgiving their daughters are coming home and Alex tells them about the crazy idea their mother has got about going to school, and one of them supports her, the other one doesn’t. She and Brad are still mailing and they give each other friendship and support. Around Christmas Alex finally tells her that school is up to her but that he will not support her at all. She also gets to know that one of her daughters is not coming home for Christmas and that upsets her extremely much. Anyway, Faith starts school in January and one of her classes is going to Washington on a four day field trip. The trip ends one day to soon because their teacher had to leave and when she comes home she finds a couple of shoes that isn’t hers and in the unmade bed she finds a black thong and a black bra. She leaves and comes back the day after and tells Alex what she’d seen and he blames her and then he moves out. Around this time Brad is breaking up with his wife and ending his empty marriage. Faith is changing through this story and at the end she stands in front of one of her most difficult decisions, to share her biggest secret that is haunting her to Brad…
My thoughts

As I read this book I discovered that I am not a fan of it at all, I actually got bored by reading it and I got really disappointed because I thought that the book would be much more interesting. First and foremost it’s a book of repeated sentences and facts. Danielle Steel writes the same thing, but the formulation is different, at every third page, but I admire her because I never believed that there are so many ways to say the exact same thing! She keeps telling us these things over and over again like we are going to forget something from page to page as we read. Is she becoming senile, or does she just think that it’s a good way to tell Faith’s story? Because of this, the story of the book is extremely predictable and in some parts even sappy. You could even say that you only have to read the first few chapters and the last pages and the remaining 300 are just repetition, it would almost be half the size if she could stop repeating herself.
Though Faith is easy to like, some of the parts in this story concerning her are very unrealistic and some of them are a bit odd. For an instant, Brad was a bit too perfect. He is a busy lawyer and he can still find the time to email Faith more than once a day and when they’re not emailing each other, they’re talking on the phone, and he is always available on the computer or the phone whenever she needs him. The mails were also kind of “plastic” so to speak. You can even feel, when you read about them, that Steel didn’t put too much effort on these mails. And then, when Brad complains about his bad marriage I have to wonder who would stay in such a horrible marriage just for the sake of not getting divorced. One of the other things I found a bit strange was Faith’s praying. She always finds an open church and then she prays as though she was deeply religious, but her personal life doesn’t show any sign of the religion she is supposed to have. The only thing she seems to do when it comes to the whole church aspect is go to the church, pray, light a candle and leave. The only thing she does besides that in the church is to confess, but she overdoes it, she even goes to confession to confess having “feelings” for Brad. It’s sweet and so on, but not realistic unless you live by every single one of our Lord’s commands. Faith is one of those classic “pew potatoes” (I got that from a movie and I think they are called so but I don’t remember) who takes their faith of with their church clothes. Steel also concentrates way too much on Jack, Faith’s deceased brother, and writes about him as though he is still alive, which just confuses me and not until I had read half the book I was a 100% sure that he was actually dead. One more of these unbelievable things is that Alex, Faith’s husband, overreacts to the fact that Faith decides to attend law school. He is one of those guys who think that the wife should be at home all day long cleaning and cooking and so on. But since he was having an affair all along and his intensions were to leave Faith, why did he make such a big deal out of it? It didn’t make any sense to me at all. Then we...