Danielle Steel is an author of over one hundred sixty-four books. Out of those books, she has written one hundred forty novels, eighteen children’s books, four nonfiction books, and a book of poetry. In 2002, the French government declared her as an Officier of the distinguished Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2014, a Chevalier of the Order of the Legion d’Honneur in Paris. Steel is a very well known author, many of her works have risen to the New York Times Bestseller List, one of of her most recent books was a novel title The Right Time.
The Right Time is a novel about a girl named Alexandra Window, who had a passion for writing crime novels. Her mother left her at a very young age, leaving her to live with her father, who read the crime novels that motivated her. From the day Alexandra told her father she wanted to write crime stories, he told her, “If you’re going to write mystery books, you’ll either have to write cozy mysteries, like a woman called Agatha Christie, or if you write crime stories like I and a lot of men read, you should probably do it under a man’s name.”
By the time she was in college, Alexandra began to write novels under the name Alexander Green, a thirty-six year old male who lived in England and Montana. Her novels became a huge success from the beginning and Alexandra continued to write, living a double life as a successful male writer and a female girl trying to make her way in the world.
Throughout her double life, Alexandra was lying to everyone that she encountered, her publishers didn’t know who she was for a long time. As Alexander Green’s fame grew, she began to worry about her web of lies. One of her novels was turned into a book, and she had to appear on the set as Green’s assistant, telling the crew that Green was simply too shy to meet with them. When friends or dates asked what she did for a living, she’d state that she was a ghostwriter or tell others that she didn’t want to write all. Each person she encountered heard a different story, and it became harder to keep her secret. As the book progressed, the story took a shift and Alexandra began to search for a partner that she could trust enough to tell her secret, and feared she would never find that person.
The pacing of the book felt very rushed. The book followed her life from the time she was seven years old until she was forty. Some of the chapters covered a year of her life at a time, while others covered multiple years. While the timeline was rushed, the character development lacked somewhat. Alexandra grew up but she never grew as a character. She stayed the same shy, secretive girl that she had been at seven. She loved to write, and firmly believed in her father’s beliefs that a woman wouldn’t be accepted the way a man would in the literary world. She continued to bury herself in lies and never felt secure about her secret until the very last page of the book, when she accepted an award on behalf of Green. “They didn’t announce her name when she collected the award. They didn’t have to. She knew she had written the books and so did the people she loved.”
The writing style followed the rushed form of the pace of the book. It was hard to know how much time had passed. Characters came in and out of the story to the point that I would forget who they were. I’d read their name and say, “Who is this again?” The other characters felt very flat, because they were in and out of the picture so much. It felt less like a plot and more a description of what happened in each year of her life and how she wrote book after book, and became her own assistant. It felt a little too unrealistic for a girl of twenty-four to graduate college, have five novels, and a movie under her belt, no matter how good of a writer she was.
I had a hard time finishing the book. The plot didn’t have much build up, and the direction it took changed too much for me. I couldn’t grow attached to the characters, or feel a connection to the story at all. I thought it would be a story about a girl who overcame the sexist stereotype that a woman couldn’t write, but I was left disappointed when the only true character development she gained was that she learned to live happily with her secret.
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