Second day of spring break…I blissfully spent most of yesterday being rather unproductive…generally a necessity for at least the first day of a break, regardless of what else I have on the docket. Then I made dinner (apparently way too spicy…I really need to just set down the cayenne jar and take two giant steps backward…but I figured, heck, it was Indian food–it was supposed to be spicy!) and did the dishes, only reverse of that chronology. Although, I suppose I did do the dinner dishes after we ate as well, so, with dinner thus bookended, either timeline works equally well.
I have begun reading, as I never did back when I was in junior high and 
everyone else did, V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic. I read a few of her other books around that earlier time, and I remember the contents as fluffily enthralling and somewhat scandalous. As FitA is probably her very best known book of gloomy mansions and illicit affairs, I figured I might as well give it a read, as, if nothing else the story would be a bit of silly fun to pass time on my spring break.
The book is truly dreadful. The writing is — and I say this as one who is rather fond of purple prose — ridiculously flowery and overdone. The characters are similarly so, and generally not very believable. The intense dialogue and heartfelt confessions make me giggle at their absurdity.
(I have to mention, as a side-note…the page I found the cover image on was a blog called “Book Reviews for teens, by teens”…and the reviewer had this to say about the book: “This book is a beautifully written story about love,family and hope. This book will have you hooked right from the beginning, and you’ll be turning the pages quite quickly to it’s conclusion. Though quite sad and realistic…” I don’t believe that anyone over the age of 20 will hold with this opinion of Andrews’ writing, but as an amusing contrasting viewpoint that, in all honesty, I mock, I wanted to share it with you.)
The skies are clear today and I expected warmer weather than we have been 
subjected to over the past few chilly, rainy days. A glance at Weatherbug, however, suggests that is not the case, with temperatures in the high thirties and low forties. Ahh well. At least it’s not raining.
Edit: I trudged my way through to the very end, and FitA never got any better. I have no desire to pick up the rest of the series to find out what happens to the ill fated “Dresden Dolls”…but I do have a mild interest in hunting down the V.C. Andrews books I read as a teen to discover the magnitude of crappy writing that I overlooked in my innocent youth.
You may want to skip re-reading any of your old favorites from VC Andrews. I’ve done it, and books that I was in love with as a teen are horrible now. All of them have that flowery writing, and they all follow the same basic formula: Girl has a hard life, but she loves her family, especially the brother who she is strangely attracted to, despite knowing it is wrong. She eventually finds out that she was kidnapped/switched at birth/given away by her real family, which is very rich. She goes to live with this rich family, though she misses her dear brother, who she now knows she is allowed to have these confusing feelings for (nevermind the ick factor of their being raised as brother and sister). The rich family holds a terrible secret, usually related to the reason that she was raised elsewhere. As a result of revealing this dark secret, someone in the rich family ends up dying/in a mental institution/living the rest of their life in a twisted fantasy which revolves around the girl. After everything is happy and resolved, the girl marries her brother/childhood sweetheart and has a daughter. Right after her daughter turns 16, our main girl dies, leaving her daughter an orphan. The old family secrets come back to haunt the daughter, and she must come to terms with some life altering situation. Finally, we are presented with a pre-history story of a woman from the main girl’s past, who is either the villain, or someone we never met in person. This story changes everything we thought about this woman, and makes us sympathetic to her situation and reasons for why she did whatever it was that changed the life of our main girl, thus rendering the entire saga worthless.
I think VC Andrews had a thing for her brother and hated her mother. She seems to use these themes a lot in her stories…
Yeah, I was on the website yesterday, and it had all of the various series listed, and so I spent some time clicking on the links and reading the synopses…and I think EVERY SINGLE series starts with a beautiful but poor female protagonist (usually more than a little poor — living in the ghettos of DC or the backwoods of the Ozarks or a shack with her Cajun healer grandmother) who has, along with naughty feelings for her brother, some Great Dream i.e. music, theater, painting…something that will fulfill all her hopes and change everything…if only she can find a way to pay for it.
Yeah, and then her parents die or something and she ends up finding out that, *gasp!* she comes from money…how come she never knew? And then goes and lives with said rich family, “but there is a dark secret in her family’s past, which when revealed, will drive her towards maddness!” In like, every single book.
Yeah, and then she gets away and has a kid, often with someone she shouldn’t have, like HER OWN BROTHER, but it’s okay, because their life is still perfect and beautiful and their naughty incest didn’t have any adverse effects…until the Shadow Of The Past comes to haunt the happy perfect child’s life…oh no!
And that was how every single series synopsis went. Like, EVERY one.
Oh jeez, I’m rolling over this one! I knew even then that those books all had the same theme. But I loved them anyway. I remember reading them, feeling guilty because the content was “too old” for me with all of its talk about sex and affairs and brotherly lust. Had I waited till I was “old enough” I never would have read them. Glad to know we shouldn’t re-read them. I still think back fondly to my two favorites: My Sweet Audrina, and the whole Heaven series.
“My Sweet Audrina” might be the best of the books…the story seems (at least as I recall) to have a little more depth. Other than that, I only ever read the ‘Dawn’ series…or part of it. But I, too, felt a bit guilty at the time, sure someone was bound to stop me from reading such ‘adult’ material….though I’m not sure WHY I though that, as my parents told me about the birds and the bees pretty early on, and didn’t care if I sat around at seven paging through one of my dad’s skin mags (I found the dirty jokes hilarious). But I do recall a sense of shock to discover the subject matter of the popular writer’s works. Not many best selling authors have such a heavy focus on incest in their books…