Winners

by Danielle Steel

[Heather]

Lily is 17 and is on the U.S. Olympic Ski Team when a chairlift she is riding on breaks. She falls and is paralyzed from the waist down. Now Lily and her father need to figure out how to move on.

Danielle Steel is one of my guilty pleasures but Holy Cow did she phone it in on this one. First of all Lily is 17 and on the Olympic team and several of her friends at school are on the Olympic team? It makes the U.S. Olympic team sound like an after school club. They only train in the winter. They never go to any other competitions than the Olympics. When she gets interested in the Paralympics she wishes that there were more competitions than just the Paralympics every 4 years. I'm not expecting exacting research but I spent 2 minutes on Google and found out that the average age of people on the U.S. National Ski Team is 26 and found the schedule of the many international Paralympic skiing events for the year.

This book also discusses the surgeon who operates on Lily - whose husband dies the same night. Lily's father is absolutely abusive to her and she takes it even though other doctors want to (correctly) have him removed by security. She says that they can't understand because they aren't parents. I understand that the correct thing to do when someone shoves nurses out of the way to get into the trauma center and then threatens to kill you if their critically injured child dies is to call the police. If it wasn't a critical case, you tell them to get out and not to come back. Been there, done that.

So of course you see where that relationship is going, but to Danielle Steel's credit, it is not the focus of the book.

The book talks a lot about rehab but glosses over any medical problems and just discusses how hard is it is get anyone to serve you at high end department stores when you are in a wheelchair. First world problems, I suppose.

I like some of her other books but I'd skip this one.