January 2017
If you want romance and happy endings, Danielle Steel is the writer for you – in addition, her prose flows gently along, making for an undemanding and pleasant read.
Blue is a boy-loves-girl story, but not in the Romeo and Juliet sense. The eponymous hero is a young teenager sleeping rough in New York. His mother has died; he has no contact with his father and the aunt with whom he has been living has four children, an unreliable husband and such limited space that Blue has decided he shouldn’t be there, adding to the problems.
Ginny is a human rights worker whose work, to which she is dedicated, takes her to some of the world’s war-torn, famine-ridden places where her own life is not infrequently at risk.
She cares not: she has thrown herself into the work in order to try to forget the tragic death of her husband and their three-year-old son, three years before the story opens. On the anniversary of their death, she is back in New York, and contemplating suicide as an end to her misery.
A chance encounter with Blue brings them together as friends, and the relationship develops in ways that help and comfort both of them. The boy’s background of abuse by a priest determines Ginny to fight for justice for him and other children facing the same horrors.
All ends not just well, but very satisfactorily for all concerned.