The House, Danielle Steel

Erik Singer reads Daniele Steel's newest with wit, skill, and an uncommonly pleasant voice that keeps one listening even when the writing is clunky. Generally agreed not to be Steel's best, this book follows attorney Sarah Anderson as she searches for happiness in her successful but emotionally arid life. An unexpected inheritance frees her to pursue her dream of restoring a crumbing San Francisco mansion. In the process, she finds love, marriage, and motherhood. Singer's clear reading can't help but highlight the repetitiousness of Steel's writing. But he glosses over the reiterations as gracefully as possible and provides interesting interpretations of the main characters that reveal his evident narrative skills. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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Sarah Anderson, a beautiful, successful thirtysomething attorney, is having a midlife crisis. She's become a workaholic, spending 60- to 70-hour weeks at the office, and she is involved in an unhappy relationship with a man she only sees on weekends, who refuses to involve her in any other aspect of his life. She lives in a dumpy apartment, which contains the same furniture she used in college, and she has no outside interests other than the sometime boyfriend and her job. Everything changes, however, when an eccentric, elderly client of Sarah's dies and leaves her a small fortune and a message: to use the money for something wonderful, to live well, and to think about something other than work. Following this advice, Sarah purchases the dilapidated old mansion the client had lived in (after finding out that it was her own grandfather who originally built it), breaks up with the cheating boyfriend, and focuses all of her attention on rehabbing the old house. As she works to restore the place, she finds contentment in her new pastime; a nice, normal boyfriend in the architect who is helping her; and familial contentment as both her mother and grandmother find happiness in the purchase of this house. A typical Steel fairy tale. Kathleen Hughes