“Ever since I started writing novels myself, I guess I’ve been a bit more chary of parlour games such as this. An excellent piece of writing (even if I didn’t know who frequently mentioned David Lodge was), this paragraph in particular rang extremely true for me: While looking for bad books, I came to this post in the Imaginary Museum blog by Dr. The protagonist is arguably Sheldon’s best I’ve read so far. As Sheldon at his worst wrote characters as either dumb, naive dopes or ruthless Machiavellian masterminds, having someone who can truly have elements of both strikes me as a solid achievement.
One legitimately good part is its main character, with Lara drawing both opposition and sympathy. Sheldon focuses too much on the nuts and bolts of Lara’s building development, something he doesn’t write well. There are a few weird choices like the decision to have all the Scottish character dialogue in clunky phonetic writing that subtracts more than it adds. The plot is a little more scattershot than what Sheldon was capable of in some of his other books, and the ending feels a little rushed. And it’s not just the formula being familiar to me by now. Yet there’s just so much that brings it down. It’s still a very readable book, and it’s still well ahead of The Other Side of Midnight. This one, released later in his life, feels a little less than his at his best. It’s the type of gilded trash melodrama I know very well after reading so many of his books. Sidney Sheldon’s The Stars Shine Down is the story of ruthless businesswoman Lara Cameron, her rise and fall as she builds a real estate empire and gets entangled with everyone from mob lawyers to piano players. Sheldon has written a lot better, so I don’t recommend this book.
Sheldon’s writing style just isn’t suited for pure thrillers, and this exaggerated version of it was even worse.Īlso, the stakes seemed petty (with the wealth of its centerpiece character told more by telling than showing), and the plot was confused with a lot of loose threads and super-quick wrap ups. More importantly, the book tried to be an outright thriller at times instead of a “pop epic” chronicling a tawdry saga of wealth and romance. The prose seemed even more bare-bones than the norm for the author, going from a strength to a weakness. However, this takes things in different directions. Like every single other one of Sheldon’s books, it’s “gilded sleaze” with simple, easy prose. How so? First, the obvious needs to be stated.
Sidney Sheldon’s Morning, Noon, and Night is one of his later books, beginning with a ruthless billionaire falling into the sea off of his yacht and dealing with the subsequent power struggle.
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