As soon as we can afford them, I’ll be sure to recommend getting those. (Since the county laid half the staff off last year, it’s not going to be very soon.)
It was funny, I saw the ads for the movie without realizing that it had been a novel. It looked kind of scary. So a year or two later, I was at the video store on Halloween, and I wanted to get a couple of scary movies. I picked that and House. House was your average basic scary movie, nothing to write home about really. But Flowers was totally unexpected. I had no idea where it was going. I also liked the cinematography, the acting, and especially the score.
I liked it enough that I watched it a few times. I thought if I liked the movie, I’d love the book. Then I found out that it was an entire series, so I decided to go ahead and buy the whole thing.
I HATED the style of writing. It was like a bad romance novel. But I was determined to get through it all. It was about 2 weeks of pain, but I did it.
I want those 2 weeks back.
I remember first reading Flowers because I was into horror as a teen and loved sick things. But I couldn’t get too far–Flowers is SO schmaltzy/romance-y. I read another V.C. Andrews book, Tarnished Gold, about a poor girl on the bayou who gets raped by a rich guy. His wife can’t have kids, and apparently is insane, and invites the poor girl to live in a tiny room in their mansion and then give up the baby…and then she ends up dying and it’s all FRIGHTFULLY romantic.
My seventh grade copy of Flowers in the had the corners bent down so much they just fell off. Only made getting to the good stuff that much easier! God 'tween girls are horny little devils.
Hahahaha… yes me too. I remember my sister and her friends reading it. I read them and devoured them. Then I remember at camp all us Senoir girls reading them.
I used to LOVE them, but looking back they were SO cheesy!
Sorry…can I be a bit of a language Nazi here…
It WAS a bad romance novel, (no like,almost, or anything else - just an outright statement of fact)
It’s interesting that Flowers in the Attic is one of those books that no males ever seem to read (or at least admit to reading.) Just like Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent.
Heh - I read it, and the sequels, I think about 70% of the series, and to my shame I have also read Sidney Sheldon. :eek:
In my defense, I was in a New Country, waiting to start work, had no money and it was the only reading material available
I have to admit to reading the book and I’m a guy. I stumbled upon the movie on TV and I have always liked “locked room scenarios” or “prison break” stories which Flowers is sort of like. So I got the book and started reading, it was really sick far more than the movie which was toned down a bit. Just from memory we have: incest, rape, beatings, infanticide, child abandonment, flogging, children being ordered to strip naked, drinking blood, watching mother have sex etc. Again sick and then I learned this book is read almost exclusively by young teen girls, WTF! Girls are supposed to be “every thing nice”. This is twisted, twisted stuff what’s the deal?
When I was a tween & teen, my fiction tastes were basically “the more fucked up, the better.” Flowers in the Attic, serial killer stories, Divorce Court (it got pretty twisted, I’m telling you!). I probably would have LOVED Jerry Springer if it had been on at the time.
My armchair psychology is that my life was so standard and decent, it was fascinating to read about simply awful, unimaginable things. I’ve read that true crime fiction is largely consumed by suburban housewives, and it rings true.
Now that I have more knowledge of weird, twisted, awful things that happen in real life, I tend to avoid stuff like that. But yeah, when you’re a sheltered girl just starting to learn about sex & all, it’s intriguing.
(BTW, as I recall, the reason the kids had to be hidden from the grandfather is that they themselves were products of incest - the mom married her cousin or something. So yeah, the books presented it as something of a “congenital form of crazy.”)
They aren’t. They are freaky little horndogs just like everyone else.
Question. Have you ever actually known a girl?
She married her uncle, her mother’s brother IIRC. This pissed off her father so much that he wrote her out of his will. He eventually wrote her back in, with the proviso that if it ever turned out that she had children from that union, she’d be out of the will again. Hence the hiding of the kids.
In a later book, Cathy ended up marrying her brother. He died on his 36th birthday, just like her father/great uncle.
Ahem.
It was like a bad romance novel, ONLY FAR WORSE.
If I can be a bit of a romance novel Nazi here…
Flowers in the Attic is not a romance novel. A romance novel’s plot is incidental to the focus on the development of the relationship between the male and female protagonist. At most, Flowers shares in the tradition of the Gothic novel (of which Rebecca is the most familiar example) which is also the forbear of the Romance novel.
In that sense, it is very much “like” a romance novel, a bad one, without being one.
Thank you so very much for this. I giggled throughout.
Good point about romance novel protagonists. I’ve never actually read one (tried once, nearly puked), but from what I understand, the female protagonist is a misunderstood woman surrounded by douchebags. The male protagonist is the stong silent type who takes what he wants, and is the only one who understands the female. I suppose you could fit Flowers into that mold, but you’d need a shoehorn and a hammer to do it.
If only! Malcolm’s dad was Garland, who was married to Alicia. Garland and Alicia had Christopher. Then, Malcolm got Alicia pregnant. That baby was Corinne, who ended up marrying Christopher. Corinne and Christopher were the parents of Cathy and Christopher, who were locked in the attic and Did It.
So, Cathy and Christopher’s parents were really half-brother and sister! :eek:
I did this from memory…
And that’s not even mentioning the next two generations.
While I was reading this dreck, a friend asked what the plot was. I tried to explain the familial relations, and had to draw him a map. He still didn’t get it.