If There Be Thorns, Part One: Your Whole Life Is a Lie

Since posting the Prelude, the If There Be Thorns fans came out of the woodwork.  I'm so pleased, but also slightly relieved, because I found myself saying uncharacteristically positive things about this book and I was afraid people would think the Andrews estate had sent me a nasty letter or something.  I legitimately try to laud the positive aspects of the books when I stumble across them, but Petals was a long, hard slog for me and by the time I reached that fuck-you-I-ain't-gotta-explain-shit ending, I'd pretty much given up on redemption.

Probably a much bigger issue is that the word "crazy" as applied to mental illness gets bantered around very casually.  There is nothing like labeling a character generic "crazy" to make me start analyzing.  While I do have some background in psychology, I am not qualified or licensed to make diagnoses, even for fictional characters.  If I make a giant mistake with the psych stuff, please call me out on it.

If There Be Thorns: The Prelude

People tend to hate this book for two reasons, the first being the dual narrator thing.  I can't blame 'em: multiple first-person narrators are difficult to write and a pain in the butt to read, especially if the voices are not very distinctive.  She does a very good job of alternating between characterization--you can open the book at random and know after only a few words if you're in a Bart chapter or a Jory chapter--but voice-wise?  Not so much.  All of Andrews characters use the same syntax and vocabulary.  She makes an effort by having Bart drop his Gs and use a lot of sentence fragments, but for the most part, the narration is pretty uniform.

The other reason is Bart.

I'll make a case for Bart.  He ends up with the strongest, most complex characterization in the entire book, leaving the rest of the cast looking like indecisive, oblivious milquetoasts with their heads up their asses.  A lot of people find Bart creepy and off-putting, which is absolutely the case, but there is no denying that he is indeed Cathy's kid.

If There Be Thorns is arguably Andrews' most ambitious novel thus far.  She's writing from the perspective of two very young characters.  There are two narrators who alternate chapters.  And it's the only Andrews' novel with male protagonists.

That being said, all these things are executed pretty badly, though not all that much worse than in any of her other novels.  I've complained before that Andrews is terrible at writing realistic children, and males, and indeed human beings.  When all these elements are pushed to the forefront at the same time, the weaknesses are all the more obvious.

Yet on a technical level, this is probably one of Andrews' better novels.  Since she's dealing with a shorter period of time than the other books--a single summer, rather than years--a lot of the pacing and continuity errors that were so confusing in the first two books vanish.  And at times she gives a very clear image of the separation between adult-world and child-world, and the uneasiness of children who realize that their parents are untrustworthy even while they are totally dependent on said parents.  These are themes that were very prevalent in Flowers in the Attic, but here, she seems to get further under their skin.

Shall we start this thing?  Let's start this thing!

Petals on the Wind, Part Ten: In Which All Those Other Christmases Were Foreshadowing

Welcome to the conclusion of Petals on the Wind!  Shit's about to get Jane Eyre around here, complete with fire, crazy first wives, and people stuffed in the attic.

I'm going to apologize right now.  In this section I ended up extensively questioning a major plothole that quickly spun out of control, resulting in me spending two paragraphs analyzing how the definition of the word "to" changes the entire outcome of the book.  I am not exaggerating.  I'm not even being pedantic.  The editing in the final section of this book was so shoddy that I was reduced to close analyzing individual prepositions in order to figure out what the hell was going on.

In my defense, it was kind of an important part of the book--it might actually be the book, in my opinion--and it was done in an attempt to finally answer the number one question I've seen regarding this particular book: what happened to Cory's body?

Petals on the Wind, Part Nine: You Really Didn't Think This Revenge Thing Through, Did You?

Greetings to the thousand extra page views per day I've been getting since Lifetime released Flowers in the Attic! 

 I feel I should warn you right now: if you love these books unconditionally, this blog is probably going to disappoint or upset you.  Here at the VCABlogorama, our love for the works of V.C. Andrews is as conditional as it is genuine, and we do a lot of snarking and criticizing.  The lesson of V.C. Andrews' novels is that people sometimes do terrible things out of love.  We snark because we love.    And hey!  At least I'm not poisoning anyone's doughnuts!*

But to serious matters.

This section is a little . . . rapey.  I dare say this is about as rapey as these books get, at least until we get to My Sweet Audrina (where I advise you to slip on some hip-waders because we're going to be wallowing in it).  It is almost impossible to get through this section without devolving into babbling Lovecraftian incoherence about how rape is portrayed in this section.  Therefore, trigger warning:

You have been warned by Trigger!

Petals on the Wind, Part Eight: Everything's Coming Up Carrie

Carrie is the buttmonkey of this series.

Fairly recently a commenter said that the character of Carrie made her uncomfortable simply because whenever Carrie appears on the page, it's because she's about to be victimized.  I agreed completely with the reader's opinion, but I also grimaced because I had just finished drafting the post for this section, I knew what was coming, and I really don't like making people uncomfortable (I'm a Southerner; it's engrained).

I feel sorry for Carrie as a character, though probably not for the reasons Andrews intended.  She's such an underutilized character when she could have been so much more.  Cathy claims to love her like a child, but Carrie's feelings and well-being are constantly neglected and forgotten.  She could have been a grounding force for Cathy, or her opposition, or anything.  Instead it seems the plot forgets all about her unless it's about to do something terrible to her.

Anyway, you are very, very correct to be suspicious of the book's sudden interest in Carrie right now.

I hope you brought your flashlights, gentle readers, because the book's about to get dark.

Um. Oops?

Those of you who visited this blog late last night--and my stat-box says there were about twenty of you--may have seen a partial review of the first section of If There Be Thorns.  It was late, I was sleepy, someone at Blogger put the Post button next to the Save button . . . mistakes were made.

Just wanted to post an apology and an explanation of why that post is no longer here.  You weren't hallucinating, and there was nothing wrong with your browser.  But hey!  At least there's proof that If There Be Thorns is a thing that will happen!

Meanwhile, Part Seven of the Petals on the Wind recap is up, and we're one week away from the new Flowers movie!

Film Recaps: Flowers In the Attic (1987)

Happy New Year, readers!

Considering what a cult phenomenon the original Andrews books were at their peak, it amazes me that they only ever had one major media tie-in.  Oh, the idea gets shuffled around now and then--there was a plan to film the Landry Saga as a television series, and the Rain thing happened--but nothing ever seemed to come of it until recently, when, out of nowhere, Lifetime announced the forthcoming remake.

There's a lot of potential factors for this long delay.  Andrews was notoriously reclusive.  Marketing might have forced her to deal more with the public than she cared to.  She also seems to have been as protective of her intellectual properties as she was of her privacy; it's known she demanded script approval and that she went through five scripts before selecting the one that eventually got produced She did not, however, reject the treatment by Wes Craven; that was someone else's bad decision.  You can read the Craven script here, where it is available courtesy of the amazingly vast Complete V.C. Andrews site.   It has incest!*
 
Finally, the immediate aftermath of Andrews' death was fraught with so much red tape that perhaps no one wanted to touch the mess.

In the end, someone did film an Andrews novel.  Just one.  And it was panned so solidly that no one dared mention its name again.

Warning: this review is very long and very gif-heavy, because give me an avi of FITA and a copy of Photoshop and I just can't stop.

The Suspense!

Watch this space on New Year's Day for a surprise!

A big surprise.

::side-eyes the ever-growing Word file::

A big, big, twenty-seven-pages-and-counting surprise . . .

Petals on the Wind, Part Six: In Which We are Going to Carry On as if Nothing Happen

After confronting Julian with her upcoming nuptials, Cathy goes back home for--oh look, another Christmas.  Considering that this book culminates in a dramatic Christmas Eve face-off, I'd like to say that making Christmas a constant touch-point is Andrews's way of foreshadowing, but I think she just really really enjoys gift-porn. 

"Thank God I had Paul to escape to," Cathy gushes.  "And I wasn't going to let Julian take the joy from this Christmas.  For this was the time Paul and I had agreed to announce our engagement, and the only person who could ruin my happiness now was Chris."  AND HE WILL.

Petals on the Wind, Part Five: In Which They Actually Leave the House

The next chapter takes up immediately after Cathy finishes screaming about her pain from across the dinner table. Chris objects that they don't need to go to Virginia to look for evidence of Cory's death because it's entirely possible that he could have died of pneumonia, the way their mother said he did.

A) I don't see how what he died of precludes anyone from getting those records and trying to find out where the kid's buried so that if nothing else they can get some closure, and

B) YOUR LITTLE SISTER TESTED POSITIVE FOR ARSENIC POISONING.  CATHY TESTED POSITIVE FOR ARSENIC POISONING.  YOU YOURSELF TESTED POSITIVE FOR ARSENIC POISONING.  YOU GAVE THE MOUSE A DOUGHNUT THAT YOUR YOUNGER SIBLINGS HAD BEEN EATING, AND IT WENT TOES-UP AN HOUR LATER.  FUTURE MEDICAL DOCTOR, EVERYBODY!

The original version of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" was a very short, traumatic book.

Carrie, by the way, hasn't stopped crying since this car trip was proposed.

Petal on the Wind, Part Three: Every Man in This Book is a Freakin' Rapist

I, um, kind of had a complete meltdown in this section?  I apologize in advance, and really, I tried to make it as relevant as possible to the subject at hand, since it touched on a theme that is going to carry on through the remainder of . . . well, all of the books.  Because when I say "every man in this book is a rapist," I'm not talking in the Andrea Dworkin all-sex-is-rape sense.  I mean that literally every man in this book is a freakin' rapist.  

Wait, I take it back.  There is one man who is not a freakin' rapist.  But he's very much a sideline character, he only appears for one chapter, and he vanishes without a trace immediately afterwards.  I say this like he's some big mystery character, but really, he's just so inconsequential that I can't be arsed.*

So, in a nutshell, we're going to be talking about rape, a conversation that was bound to happen considering that every man in this book is a freakin' rapist.  I don't know how we avoided it this long, honestly. 

Petals on the Wind: The Covers

Once upon a time, when I was a mere slip of a lass, there used to be advertisements in the back of the original first-edition V.C. Andrews paperbacks from which you could, if you were so inclined, order poster-sized prints of the covers of the first three books in the Dollanganger series.  Suitable for framing and hanging over the fireplace.  I swear, this happened.

The artist for the original four Dollanganger (and My Sweet Audrina) covers was Gillian Hills, a woman whose face and life both resemble a V.C. Andrews heroine's: she was a stunning, globe-trotting blonde debutante whose C.V. includes starring roles in several reputable but mostly forgotten films (including a blink-of-the-eye cameo in A Clockwork Orange) and a career as a chanteuse.  Her music was typical girl-pop for the time, but her voice was surprisingly sweet and sultry, with a lot of emotional depth--even beyond the "everything sounds awesome in French" aspect.

Yes.  That is the woman who painted the original V.C. Andrews covers.  As much as I was surprised to be able to find any information about her at all, to find that she was such an impressive, multi-talented woman was incredible.

Petals on the Wind, Part Two: Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree

So . . . where were we?

I seem to have covered most of Part One, which is basically establishing the kids with Dr. Paul.  Other than that, nothing of dire importance happened in that section.  I mean, there was a shopping montage, and it was pretty great, and Chris tried to bone his sister, which happens roughly seven hundred times in this book, and Cathy flits around in skimpy underwear a lot, which also happens about seven hundred times.

Part One, thank goodness, is fairly short.  Part Two is where we finally get our pot a-boiling.  Once more into the breech, dear friends!
 

Petals on the Wind, Part One: The Great White Flight

Welcome, dear readers, to Petals on the Wind, already known in my house as “the book where I get to break out all my Black Swan macros.”   Nah, I kid.  Not about the macros—I’ve been stockpiling those since I started putting the site together in sole anticipation of this book—but any other comparison to Black Swan will be purely coincidental.  I haven’t even seen that movie, but I am told it is a probing if flawed analogy for an eating disorder.  This book on the other hand, is an analogy for . . .  well, no, there’s no room for analogy in Andrewsland.

I have always said that the great thing about the whole Dollanganger series is that while the characters in Flowers in the Attic can be seen as somewhat sympathetic, every problem they have in their life thereafter is no one’s fault but their own.  All three of the remaining Dollangangers go about gleefully fucking up their lives and personal relationships, and it’s hard to feel a moment’s pity for any of them.  Even Carrie, who ends up being the sacrificial lamb, would have fared far better in the company of people who took two seconds to consider that maybe having your mother lock you up for three years, being poisoned, starved, and sun-deprived, watching your identical twin die, and being a first-hand witness to the blatantly obvious sexual tension between your two older siblings—well, all of that MIGHT REQUIRE SOME PROFESSIONAL COUNSELLING.  But no.  It’s Andrewsland.  Modern psychology need not apply, unless it comes in the form of Our Heroine being wrongfully committed by her dastardly stepmother.

Mostly, though, this is the book where my sympathies swung to the grandmother.  Plainly, she was a woman possessed of a prophetic soul whose only crime was trying to save the world from these horrible people.  Because by the end of this one, Cathy lays waste to everyone and everything in her whole life, and it’s all her own fault.  As my own dear grandmother (who never once locked me in an attic) used to say, that child is too dumb to cook quick-grits.

Trust me.  In the South, them's fightin' words.

But enough of that!  Let's get this party started!

FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC: the Prelude

What better place to begin than the book that started it all? Flowers in the Attic, also known as "Deflowered in the Attic" (but only because I just called it that OH MY WIT), is the book that introduced us to the incestuous genetic cesspool that is the Dollanganger Saga.

V.C. Andrews shopped this book as a true story, and a couple of her relatives have backed up that story over the years. The legend goes that when V.C. was spending one of her several stays in a hospital, she was taken with a handsome young doctor who confided that he had belonged to a wealthy local family that locked him and his siblings in an attic for many, many years. V.C. always insisted that the family was much too wealthy and important for the story to ever be verified, but in her original pitch letter, she described the book as "the fictionalized version of a true story" and claimed it was "not truly fiction."

Yet in another story, which appears in an excerpt from an interview published in the front of later editions shortly after her death, V.C. also claimed that her inspiration came from a dream: "I dreamed I was rich and famous--and I saw flowers growing in an attic." Based on certain details about Andrews, I am inclined to believe that this was literally a dream.

Andrews appears to have been--um. How should I put this? A very sensitive woman. Of the kind that straddles the line between genuine mysticism and New Age kookiness. Like your aunt who gets those weird newspapers. You don't have to look much further than her fiction to see that. She even seems to have been a bit of a mystic, in a thoroughly conventional, late-seventies/early-eighties Linda Goodman's Sun Signs sort of way. In her famous "Faces of Fear" interview, she stated her belief that she was an "old soul" who had lived many previous lives, and who often had precognitive dreams. I think likely what we're looking at is a combination of the two stories: that Andrews did meet her handsome young doctor, that he might have told her that he had had an unhappy childhood, and that she then had her dream and may have interpreted to mean that the doctor had been locked in an attic as a child.

Would she have believed her own interpretation? To the point that she would state it boldly and upfront to a potential publisher? Possibly; she appears to have placed great weight on her abilities. Did her publishers take her explanation as fact? Probably not. But I also think that if you're going to publish a novel in the lurid late 70s, with things like Mommie Dearest and Looking for Mr. Goodbar coming out only a few years before, the old based-on-a-true-story-so-shocking-I-mustn't-give-you-any-more-details line can't hurt your sales any.

Do I believe it's a true story? No way. If only for this reason: in this day and age of reality entertainment, open discussion of child abuse, Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer*, and talk-show culture, someone would have come forward by now. So far, there's been no one, even an obvious crazy trying to pitch a Lifetime movie. Andrews and/or her publicist seems to have cooled toward this claim over the years; once Andrews became a brand-name writer, the based-on-a-true-story angle was quietly shelved.

Therefore, I think we can get over our guilt that we are potentially lapping up the lifeblood of innocent children and dive right into this horror-show, don't you?



*No, I don't believe that was a true story either.