Teresa Calvet

A nice easy to read novel. Some surprises...but mostly typical Danielle with a nice ending. ( )

This one was good but it was not as good as some of her others. A lot of hers are very much alike and very repetitive but then she will write one that is not like that and those are the ones I love.

Francesca Thayer, newly separated form her boyfriend, is desperate. Francesca owns an art gallery that she wants to keep. She also as a mortgage on a failing old townhouse. How will Francesca make a new life for herself and keep the things she loves?

Deb F. / Marathon County Public Library
Find this book in our library catalog.

( )

44 Charles Street had potential with a deceptively interesting plot summary, but the writing and pacing took the fun out of it. The book had so much unnecessary and/or repetitive segments (and the opening chapters should have been cut - we could have learned about Francesca's financial situation and break-up in a paragraph), and I failed to see why Francesca seemed to think her life was so hard or why she was so attached to the house (especially when she basically sells it without a thought to move into another place with her new boyfriend at the end - hello, history repeating!). I don't like the message Danielle Steel was trying to send with Eileen's "online dating" storyline (I've never done it, but I know a lot of people who have used online dating and they've all managed to avoid the "characters" Eileen kept bringing through the house by utilizing their common sense). By the time I was about a third of the way through, I realized I was just wishing it was the end. The middle of the book was good, the characters were okay, but it just wasn't well-written. Basically, 44 Charles Street is quite a poorly-executed story. ( )