Title: Flowers in the Attic
Author: V.C. Andrews
Pages: 389
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1979
Dates Read: September 7, 2018 – September 9, 2018
Rating: 3 stars
Summary & Image via Goodreads: Such wonderful children. Such a beautiful mother. Such a lovely house. Such endless terror! It wasn’t that she didn’t love her children. She did. But there was a fortune at stake—a fortune that would assure their later happiness if she could keep the children a secret from her dying father. So she and her mother hid her darlings away in an unused attic. Just for a little while. But the brutal days swelled into agonizing years. Now Cathy, Chris, and the twins wait in their cramped and helpless world, stirred by adult dreams, adult desires, served a meager sustenance by an angry, superstitious grandmother who knows that the Devil works in dark and devious ways. Sometimes he sends children to do his work—children who—one by one—must be destroyed…. Way upstairs there are four secrets hidden. Blond, beautiful, innocent struggling to stay alive….
Review: “The creative genius begins in the idle moment, dreaming up the impossible, and later making it come true.”
Flowers in the Attic is the 1970s version of Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s a guilty pleasure read, a book to pick up because people said it was scandalous. And it certainly is, but it’s not stellar writing.
Cathy, Chris, Carrie, and Cory are all locked into a room in a massive mansion at the request of their mother where it’s discovered over time they are products of incest. The incestuous theme will continue throughout this series. After I read it I realized this book is like the book version of a soap opera. Where just when you think everything has died down, something totally ludicrous and ridiculous pops up for the siblings to deal with. It’s certainly written like a romance novel, where there’s always a sexual implication to everything going on. The book seemed more like a long daydream in a teen girl’s diary rather than “literature”. Even though it’s more known for the scandalous nature of the book than the writing itself, it’s still a guilty pleasure read. I won’t be reading it in public any time soon, but I’ll happily read it before bed time or when I’m bored on a Saturday afternoon.
Montana's Musings 