The Long Road Home

The Long Road Home is a 1998 romance novel written by Danielle Steel. The book was released to commercial success, despite receiving unfavorable critical reviews. It is Steel's 42nd novel. Plot Gabriella Harrison, a child of the fifties, suffers abuse from the hands of her mother, Eloise, who explains her abuse as disciplining Gabriella for being so bad. Frequent beatings mar her life. Her father scared of annoying her mother plays a spectator to all the evil happenings. Before Gabbie turns thirteen her father, tired of his wife's constant abuse towards their daughter, leaves. Her mother as always accuses Gabbie's badness for her father's departure. She says it's only because of her badness that her parents hate her, and that is exactly why her father has left them. Gabbie is then gotten rid of at a nunnery to finish out her education by her mother so she can abandon the biggest disappointment in her life. While there, Gabriella decides she wants to become a nun. In the course of being a postulant, she falls in love with a priest, Father Joe Connors. They want to move into the real world to live their life loving each other, but the priest is not confident about making it in the real world for Gabbie and the symbol of their love growing in Gabbie's womb. Incidentally the priest commits suicide with a turmoil for he cannot break the promise made to the brotherhood of serving the needed, and for he cannot live without Gabriella. Gabriella thus loses her love, and then their child in a miscarriage. Ultimately she is compelled to leave the convent for the sin committed. Cast out into society, Gabbie is determined to move on and finds an apartment where the tenants welcome the young woman lovingly, particularly an old professor. Everything seems to be going well; Gabbie has a job at a pastry shop, but loses it when she defends a child whose mother dislocates her arm in a fit of impatience. Eventually she finds a job at a book store whilst buying a Christmas present to her doting friend, the old professor.