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.

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.

Petals on the Wind, Part Seven: In Which Cathy Marries in Haste

Fun Fact: the file from which I'm working is titled "Peddles on the Wind" which always makes me think of this:

We are on the cusp of Part Three, the shortest section of this book at about fifty pages.  It's also, strangely, a very eventful section: Cathy embarks on her violent first marriage, achieves her dream of becoming a world-renown ballerina, and becomes a mother and a widow at roughly the same time. Yet the plotting issues that have plagued the first three-fifths of the book are largely non-existent.  In fact, this is a section Andrews inexplicably glossed over long periods with a handwave even when the story might have done well to linger on a few scenes.  There's barely even a Christmas to mark the passage of time.

There are other things, though.  Horrible things.  Implication-y things.

Anyway: very short section, but a longish review.  We have an entire marriage to get through, so let's get to it!

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.