Look, I know what people expect when I say I listened to a Danielle Steel audiobook. They expect me to say I ugly-cried into my pillow at 2 AM. They expect the spreadsheet to get another tally mark. But here's the thing - I finished Power Play on a Tuesday afternoon while designing a logo for a pet grooming startup, and my eyes were bone dry. Frida was asleep on my keyboard. Diego was judging me from the bookshelf. And I just sat there thinking... huh.
That's not necessarily a death sentence for a book. Not every story needs to wreck me. But when you set up two parallel lives - a woman CEO who's sacrificed everything personal to survive in tech, and a male CEO coasting on charm while hiding affairs and secrets - I need to FEEL the weight of that contrast. I ran into a similar frustration with My Father as I Recall Him — a premise loaded with emotional potential that kept me at a careful distance when I needed it to pull me under. I need the loneliness to hit me in my chest. Steel gives you the scaffolding for that emotional punch, but the audiobook experience kept me at arm's length the whole time.
Two CEOs Walk Into a Novel and Only One Has to Try
The bones of this story are genuinely interesting. Fiona Carson is a Harvard-educated single mom running a multibillion-dollar tech company in Palo Alto, and she's essentially living in a pressure cooker with no release valve. Marshall Weston is across the bay in Marin County, golden boy, perfect wife Liz who gave up her law career, three kids, the whole magazine-cover package - except he's sleeping around and playing Russian roulette with his reputation. Steel is clearly making a point about how women in power pay with their personal lives while men in power just... take more. And that point lands, intellectually. But it reads more like a thesis statement than a lived-in story. The characters move through their arcs like they're hitting marks on a stage rather than stumbling through messy human decisions.
Abuela would have had OPINIONS about Marshall, by the way. She would've been yelling at him like he was the villain in her telenovelas. "¡Sinvergüenza!" She would've loved Fiona, though. That quiet strength, the refusal to compromise. That's the kind of woman my abuela respected.
Dan John Miller and the Voice Problem
So here's where it gets complicated. Dan John Miller has solid storytelling instincts - his pacing through the narrative sections is steady, and his expressions land when he's in pure narrator mode. But this is a book that hinges on two very different people living two very different versions of power, and the voice work doesn't sell that divide. Fiona and Marshall should sound like different worlds. Instead, they blur together. It's like watching a movie where the lighting is the same in every scene - you lose the texture.
The one exception people keep pointing to is Liz, Marshall's wife, and I'll give Miller this: by the back half of the book, he found something real in her voice. There's a shift when Liz starts waking up to the reality of her marriage, and Miller's delivery gets quieter, more careful. It's the closest I came to feeling something. But by then I'd spent seven-plus hours at emotional arm's length, and one character's late-game improvement couldn't pull me back in.
The ending is also just - abrupt. Like someone hit stop on the recording. One listener described it as the narrator literally just saying "The End," and honestly? That's what it felt like. No exhale. No landing. For a nearly ten-hour listen, you want that final moment to sit with you. This one evaporated.
Where This Fits in Steel's World
I've listened to my share of Danielle Steel. She's comfort food for a reason - you know what you're getting, and sometimes that's exactly what you need. But Power Play falls into that middle zone where the premise promises more than the execution delivers. Compared to her books that really let you inside a character's emotional wreckage, this one stays surface-level. The corporate world stuff is fine but never specific enough to feel real (what does Fiona actually DO all day? What decisions keep her up at night?), and the personal drama follows predictable grooves.
At 1.0x speed - my speed, always - nearly ten hours is a real commitment. And I kept waiting for the moment where Steel would crack one of these characters open and show me something raw. It doesn't really come.
Who Gets Something Out of This
If you're a Steel completist, you'll listen regardless and you'll find it perfectly fine. If you're drawn to the gender-and-power theme, honestly, I'd point you toward memoir instead - Brené Brown or Sheryl Sandberg will give you that conversation with more heat. If you need an easy background listen for work or errands, the pacing is steady enough for that. But if you're like me and you listen for the gut punch? The moment where you have to pause and just breathe? Keep looking.
Not Every Book Gets a Tally Mark
The spreadsheet stays at 47 crying sessions this year. Power Play didn't earn one, and that's okay. Not every book is meant to break you. But this one set up the pins - the loneliness of a powerful woman, the hollow center of a powerful man, a wife realizing she built her life around a lie - and then just... didn't knock them down. My heart stayed in my chest the whole time. And for me, that's the whole point.
