Coming Out = 9 down, 91 to go

Romance
Coming Out
Danielle Steel
195 pages

While there are many people passionate about the romance genre, I am certainly not one of them. It's probably been 10+ years since I've read a Danielle Steel book.

This one followed a mother, her husband, her three college-aged children from her first marriage and the young son from her second. Much of the book centers around the coming-out debutant ball her twin daughters have been invited to since their mother comes from a privileged background.

There is much consternation between the mother and her husband, who is Jewish and views the party as discrimination, and her twin daughters, one of which wants to attend and the other who views is an arcane practice. Throw in a lovely mother-in-law, a dedicated friend, a gay son and a passionate reunion with her husband at the end of the book, and you have a blueprinted romance book.

I didn't hate the book, and it fulfilled my "romance" category. It could have been worse -- it could have been a book with the wind blowing in Fabio's head. I would just rather spend my time being a bit more challenged from a book.

With that in mind, the romantic in me has the potential to be moved by some of the mushy verbiage, including the conclusion.

There had been tears in his eyes several times that night, and in hers. It had been a night of love and celebration, a night of hope and remembrance, a night when girls became women, children become adults, and strangers become friends. Just as she had said it would be, it was a rite of passage, and a lovely tradition, and nothing more. It was a night when he had come out from an old world into a new one, when others got a glimpse backward into an old one. When the past and future met in one shining moment, when time stopped, sadness slipped away and was forgotten, and life began.