Book Review: Flowers in the Attic
Jun. 6th, 2008 02:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaTitle: Flowers in the Attic
Author: V.C. Andrews
Published: New York: Pocket Books, 2005 (1979)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 391
Total Page Count: 52,116
Text Number: 150
Read For: personal enjoyment & reading more novels about incest, checked out from the library
Short review: The four Dollanganger children have perfect suburban lives—until their father is killed in a car accident and, unable to support her children alone, their mother returns to her abusive parents. Their grandmother orders the children kept secret, locked away in a single abandoned room with access to the attic. As their seclusion builds from day into years, the older children must become parents for their younger siblings even while they go through their own turbulent, unaided adolescence themselves. This contrived isolation also leads the older siblings into incest, and for both the isolation and incest Flowers in the Attic is something of a guilty pleasure: a fairy-tale world of children without parents, fending for themselves and falling innocently into society's sins. However, the writing style, concept, and plot are so painfully unskilled, predictable, and clichéd that they suck even the guiltiest pleasure out of the book and, instead, render it just plain bad. The concept is intriguing, but the book itself is a waste of time, and I don't recommend it.
So many of the concepts of this book are secretly intriguing: the sequestered isolation of the children, haunted by the presence of their forbidding grandmother, creates a fairy-tale world where children take the place of adults and build their own rule and structure; the slowly developing romance between the older siblings Chris and Cathy, who have no one else to turn to for support or for love, is forbidden and at the same time genuinely sympathetic. As such there is the barest bit of pleasure in the concepts of the book, and in reading to the next page, the next chapter, to see how the story unfolds and how the characters come together. For these reasons, a number of reviews call Flowers in the Attic a guilty pleasure.
I would take no issue with the book if it were a titillating novel with no redeemable value, just as long as the book were still fun to read. However, Flowers in the Attic is far from enjoyable to read—instead, Andrews's writing style and storytelling verge on painfully bad. Cathy, second child and oldest sister, is the narrator; although intended to be an adult reflecting back on her early adolescence, the narrative voice sounds like a child. She approaches her story with wide-eyed exclamation points and italics, repeated obvious facts, and exclamations like "golly gee!", and this immature narration becomes quite annoying—and strips the character of the premature aging that she is supposed to undergo. Preceded by blatant foreshadowing, most pieces of the plot are visible from a long way off. Rather than creating a tense journey to their revelation, the book's "dark secrets" become laughably predictable. Combined with simplistic clichés such as an entire family with great beauty, flaxen blond hair, and names beginning with C, the novel's construction and writing style strip it of any joy. Guilty pleasure or no, redeeming value or no, the book is horribly written. It's not impossible to read, but it is an unenjoyable waste of time.
Novels about incest intrigue me, sometimes for the thought and sympathy they provoke, sometimes for the sympathy and guilty pleasure. But even as an interested reader I still have standards—although not always high, I at least prefer a book whose writing does not make me grimace or inadvertently laugh. Flowers in the Attic has intriguing premise, and the plot twists are interesting if not skillful, but I can't get past the horrible writing. Some readers may not dislike Andrews's style quite as much as I did, but I still don't recommend this book. There are better novels out there—even frivolous ones—that don't bog down their potential by skilless writing.
Review posted here at Amazon.com.
You do not even want to know how many tries it took to get this review up and published in its proper form. No, really, don't even ask. I kept accidentally pasting it into old reviews and mixing up paragraphs and losing edits and it was altogether quite the tangled mess—and all for a book review which amounts to "yeah, this one is just bad."
Author: V.C. Andrews
Published: New York: Pocket Books, 2005 (1979)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 391
Total Page Count: 52,116
Text Number: 150
Read For: personal enjoyment & reading more novels about incest, checked out from the library
Short review: The four Dollanganger children have perfect suburban lives—until their father is killed in a car accident and, unable to support her children alone, their mother returns to her abusive parents. Their grandmother orders the children kept secret, locked away in a single abandoned room with access to the attic. As their seclusion builds from day into years, the older children must become parents for their younger siblings even while they go through their own turbulent, unaided adolescence themselves. This contrived isolation also leads the older siblings into incest, and for both the isolation and incest Flowers in the Attic is something of a guilty pleasure: a fairy-tale world of children without parents, fending for themselves and falling innocently into society's sins. However, the writing style, concept, and plot are so painfully unskilled, predictable, and clichéd that they suck even the guiltiest pleasure out of the book and, instead, render it just plain bad. The concept is intriguing, but the book itself is a waste of time, and I don't recommend it.
So many of the concepts of this book are secretly intriguing: the sequestered isolation of the children, haunted by the presence of their forbidding grandmother, creates a fairy-tale world where children take the place of adults and build their own rule and structure; the slowly developing romance between the older siblings Chris and Cathy, who have no one else to turn to for support or for love, is forbidden and at the same time genuinely sympathetic. As such there is the barest bit of pleasure in the concepts of the book, and in reading to the next page, the next chapter, to see how the story unfolds and how the characters come together. For these reasons, a number of reviews call Flowers in the Attic a guilty pleasure.
I would take no issue with the book if it were a titillating novel with no redeemable value, just as long as the book were still fun to read. However, Flowers in the Attic is far from enjoyable to read—instead, Andrews's writing style and storytelling verge on painfully bad. Cathy, second child and oldest sister, is the narrator; although intended to be an adult reflecting back on her early adolescence, the narrative voice sounds like a child. She approaches her story with wide-eyed exclamation points and italics, repeated obvious facts, and exclamations like "golly gee!", and this immature narration becomes quite annoying—and strips the character of the premature aging that she is supposed to undergo. Preceded by blatant foreshadowing, most pieces of the plot are visible from a long way off. Rather than creating a tense journey to their revelation, the book's "dark secrets" become laughably predictable. Combined with simplistic clichés such as an entire family with great beauty, flaxen blond hair, and names beginning with C, the novel's construction and writing style strip it of any joy. Guilty pleasure or no, redeeming value or no, the book is horribly written. It's not impossible to read, but it is an unenjoyable waste of time.
Novels about incest intrigue me, sometimes for the thought and sympathy they provoke, sometimes for the sympathy and guilty pleasure. But even as an interested reader I still have standards—although not always high, I at least prefer a book whose writing does not make me grimace or inadvertently laugh. Flowers in the Attic has intriguing premise, and the plot twists are interesting if not skillful, but I can't get past the horrible writing. Some readers may not dislike Andrews's style quite as much as I did, but I still don't recommend this book. There are better novels out there—even frivolous ones—that don't bog down their potential by skilless writing.
Review posted here at Amazon.com.
You do not even want to know how many tries it took to get this review up and published in its proper form. No, really, don't even ask. I kept accidentally pasting it into old reviews and mixing up paragraphs and losing edits and it was altogether quite the tangled mess—and all for a book review which amounts to "yeah, this one is just bad."
