Rebecca Jones-Howe's Blog, page 14

SECRETS OF THE MORNING – A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review

Alas, we return to the Cutler series, as I have purchased the rest of the books rom my local used bookstore! SHOP LOCAL! We’re back with Dawn Cutler, and we’re eager to spend more time in her garbage life. Secrets of the Morning is the second book in the Cutler series, and it picks up right where Dawn left off.

SHADOWED BY HER TORTURED PAST, DAWN HAS A BRIGHT NEW LIFE OF GLIMMERING HOPES…

Dawn can hardly believe she’s a student at one of New York City’s best music schools. Now her most precious wish, to become a singer, can come true. But Dawn still dreams about Jimmy, her strong, intense boyfriend, and the love and anguished secrets they share.

Then Michael Sutton arrives, a new teacher at the school, a singing star and the most wonderful-looking man Dawn has ever seen. Together they create a world of feeling Dawn has never known. In his embrace Dawn awakens to disturbing, unfamiliar desires, and Michael’s promises offer a vision of music and romance forever…until he disappears.

Dazed by this cruelty, alone with the bitter fruit of his betrayal, Dawn becomes, once again, a victim of her grandmother’s twisted schemes. Desolate, she clings to the tender hope that Jimmy will return and renew with her their deepest hearts’ dream.

About the Book

Published in 1990, Secrets of the Morning features a letter from the Andrews family in regards to V.C. Andrews’ death in 1986. It’s the second book to feature this letter.

A bulk of the book takes place in New York City, where Dawn’s prestigious performing arts school, the Sarah Bernhardt School of Performing Arts, is located.

Coincidentally, I just finished Falling Stars, which also takes place in a performing arts school in New York City. I kept thinking I was gonna get the schools mixed up in my head. Fortunately, most Secrets of the Morning takes place outside of school. We’ll get to why in just a moment.

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Behind the keyhole features a shot of our aging characters: Dawn’s in the hot seat. To her left is Clara Sue, and then behind her is Philip, Grandmother Cutler, Michael Sutton, and then Jimmy to her right.

My Copy

I got the rest of the Cutler series in a massive V.C. Andrews haul from my local bookstore. Each book was like $5, which feels kind of steep for a used paperback, but I also like supporting local business’. It’s also nice to be able to shop for used books that are actually organized properly.

My copy has your standard spine creases and softened edges. The cover’s been folded all the way back. Of specific note is the ripped keyhole cover, which saddens me to no end. This is also the first book I’ve bought with the previous owner’s name written inside:

Robin Stone – Feb “92”

I have so many questions for you, Robin. Are you the sole owner of this book or did you read it and pass it down to other girls? Did you like this book? Why didn’t you take better care of this book? Why can’t you read a paperback without creasing the spine like a neanderthal? How could you be so cruel? What did you do to destroy the signature keyhole of this glorious first edition mass market V.C. Andrews paperback?

The Review

After the lackluster mess of the Shooting Stars series, I was ready to get back to that good old retro V.C. Andrews where truly awful stuff happens to the protagonist. And I’ll tell you, this book put me though a roller coaster of feelings. Most of them rage. Was it fun? Yes. Was it also agonizing?

Let me just elaborate for you, by going through all of the standard V.C. Andrews tropes.

An Innocent & Pretty, Yet Completely Naive Female Protagonist

Dawn’s now 16 and touching down in New York City. (Queue standard New York establishing shots now.) An old lady befriends her on the plane, asking if she has somebody waiting for her. Dawn’s got a cab driver but she takes forever finding him. Much of the beginning features Dawn awkwardly acquainting herself with the city.

She lives in a specialized student house run by a woman named Agnes who is apparently a former performer. Agnes, having received a letter from Grandmother Cutler about Dawn’s horrible behavior, treats her pretty awful from the start. Dawn does her chores and Agnes lifts some of her probationary restrictions, which ultimately leads Dawn down a horrible path of no good very bad decisions.

And boy, oh boy, if this novel is about anything, it’s bad decisions all around.

A Rags to Riches Plot

First off, I wanna say that the first THIRD of this book is pointless. Dawn makes a pretty ditzy but earnest and loving friend, Trisha, and they establish a standard 80’s girl relationship that wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test. Dawn spends her days pining over Jimmy (now a military man). Then she befriends this dude Arthur, who lives in the student house.

Arthur’s at the school to play the oboe (as per his adopted parents’ demands), but Dawn discovers that is true dream to write poetry. She encourages him to pursue his passion, and then he writes her a poem before he peaces out entirely. On page 119, Arthur writes her a goodbye letter and he never comes back and is never referenced again. Like why waste a third of the book on this? Is it just to prove that Dawn is nice? Is it to make her seem likable? Because none of it matters after she meets…

A Beloved Doting Paternal Figure

MICHAEL SUTTON:

He’s a singer and actor who comes to teach a very exclusive class at the Bernhardt School. Of course, Dawn gets a place in the class after singing her perfect Mary-Sue scales for him. He invites her on this date at a gallery that isn’t actually a date because shows up at the gallery with a different woman.

Later, in a one-on-one class, Michael gets all close and touches her and kisses her and professes his love. Dawn, a total idiot, falls for his second invitation to a party at his apartment. She dresses up nice and finds herself the only guest at the party. And yes, they bone.

She’s 17 now. He’s a guy in his 30’s, clearly manipulating his way into her pants:

“You are stunning, almost too beautiful to disturb, like a magnificent flower that should only be admired and never plucked. But I don’t have that kind of restraint and then again, you should not be denied the splendid ecstasy that comes when two talented and beautiful people make love.”

Seriously, fuck this guy. I wanna blame Dawn for some of her stupidity, but Michael’s the damn adult here. As much as I don’t wanna blame Dawn for being naive, it’s impossibly difficult not to hate her for falling for Michael’s utter BS. Even when Trisha tells Dawn that she’s worried about her dating an older man (who Dawn lies about and says is a divorced man named Allen who wants a younger version of his dead wife), Dawn is like: “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, HE LOVES ME!!!!!!!”

Michael is rich, too. He buys her a locket and some fake-ass Christmas gifts that he puts under a tree for her. He promises her a great Christmas. Except Christmas never comes and Dawn never even gets a chance to open all the fake gifts because…

SHE GETS PREGNANT.

Distraught, Dawn immediately tells Michael. He promises that he’ll take her to Florida, where she will have the baby and they’ll live happily ever after as a glorious family. But then, a few days later, Michael skips town, leaving Dawn to fend for herself.

Dawn runs through the streets in a frantic hallucination and manages to get hit by a car (in true melodramatic style!). Don’t worry, though, because she only suffers a three-day coma and somehow avoids breaking any bones or sustaining any damage. Then Grandmother Cutler arrives. Wanting to avoid any further embarrassment to the Cutler name, she sends Dawn off to her sister’s plantation estate to have her baby, Lady Edith-style.

A Vivid Gothic Setting

Grandmother Cutler’s sisters, Emily and Charlotte, live on the Booth Estate, an old plantation also known as The Meadows. A scraggly guy named Luther picks Dawn up from the airport and drives her there in this stanky truck. Then we arrive to a Youtube Urbex video opening montage:

Over the great round columns of the full-facade porch ran thin leafless vines that looked more like rotting rope. Some of the multipane front windows had black shutters and decorative crowns; some had lost their shutters and looked naked.

The estate is in such disrepair because Emily, or rather, “Miss Emily”, as she insists Dawn refer to her as, is a religious fanatic who believes anything of vanity or appearances is the Devils’ doing. She’s also as frugal as a Millennial drowning in student loans debt. She doesn’t spend money on repairs or cleaning or even power. The house has no hot water. They use kerosene lamps at night. In the frigid winter, they sleep with hot water bottles instead of turning on the heat.

It’s a pretty great setting, honestly, with all the empty rooms and cobwebbed corners and boiled-water baths in the pantry. It’s pure 1800’s living in The Meadows and the book is all the better for it.

A Hostile Maternal Figure (+ Bonus Mean Girl!)

Okay, so Miss Emily is a real figure to contend with. She’s supposedly a great midwife, so upon Dawn’s arrival she has Dawn strip down and she feels around her stomach and looks at her tits and assess how far along she is? Then she takes a look at Dawn’s vagina and tells her it’s gonna be a hard birth.

Not sure if that’s how midwifery works, but ooooooooookay.

Miss Emily takes all of Dawn’s clothes and gives her a flimsy cotton gown to wear during her entire stay at The Meadows. She piles on the chores for Dawn to do every day, insisting that hard work will be good for Dawn because it’ll prepare her for labour. As Dawn transitions further into her pregnancy, Miss Emily piles on increasingly difficult chores and cuts back on Dawn’s food if she doesn’t complete them. Having been through two pregnancies myself, this shit was insanely difficult to read through.

Later, when Miss Emily finds that Dawn is constipated, she forces Dawn to drink two glasses full of castor oil. Dawn diarrheas ALLLLLLLLLLL over the bathroom. It’s not until she wakes up covered in her own shit that she realizes that Miss Emily maybe might want to force her to miscarry?

Charlotte, the younger sister, is one of V.C. Andrews’ classic “simple” characters who is simple simply because she’s suffered some kind of past trauma and keeps dropping hints about a “baby” she once had. We find out that Charlotte was raped by Luther at one point in the past. She child with “devil’s ears”, according to Miss Emily. The child lived for a while, but eventually passed, though it’s never specified how.

Dawn discovers this on a night in the “forbidden wing”. When she’s confronted by Miss Emily, she immediately goes into labour and a baby girl is born. Miss Emily insists that the baby is “too small” and takes her away. This was frustrating to me because the baby was born a month early, which would mean that she’d need to be incubated, but none of that shit happens.

Dawn’s literally just like, “guess I’ll have a nap?” And then she has a nap.

Some Good Olde School Misogyny

Let’s start with this line of dialogue in the scene where Dawn protests to Miss Emily that people live more civilized lives now:

“Oh I know how people live today,” she said with that cold smile on her lips, “especially women with their fancy-smelling perfumes and seductive clothing. Don’t you know that the devil won Eve’s trust by appealing to her vanity and that ever since that hateful day, our vanity has been the devil’s doorway to our souls? Lipstick and makeup and pretty combs, lace dresses and jewelry…all devices to fan temptation and drive men to the promontory of lust. They fall,” she chanted, “oh how they fall and they take us down with them, down into the fires of hell and damnation.”

I’m not even gonna poke that fundamentalist shtick with a stick, so let’s move on!

After the baby’s birth (and subsequent kidnapping), all is lost until Jimmy returns to save the day. He has a long story about how he found Dawn, but with his masculine powers, he gives Dawn the strength to confront Miss Emily before leaving. Dawn discovers that Grandmother Cutler hatched he plan to take her baby away. So, it’s back to the Cutler’s Cove Resort to face the final boss!

BUT, not before this ridiculous shopping spree:

Jimmy was anxious to buy me new clothes and new shoes and took me to a department store as soon as we drove into a town that had one. He was very proud of being able to do it, and I saw that if I began to protest that something was too expensive, he would immediately grow upset.

Just gonna chime in with my postpartum knowledge: After having a baby, one does not simply go on a damn shopping spree. No new mother wants to put anything that isn’t a pair of sweatpants on her postpartum body. At no point does Dawn’s milk ever come in. At no point do her breasts ever ache or leak. At no point does she make Jimmy suck the milk out of her tits in the hotel room to prevent her from getting mastitis.

NONE OF THIS IS REALISTIC.

There’s plenty of misogyny in this book (which I will quote in the “bad writing” section), but the pregnancy stuff just blew my mind. Like, you’d think after Dawn loses her child that she’d go all soap opera melodramatic. Nope! She’s sad, obviously, but her rage at her grandmother and her lust for Jimmy pretty much overpower her postpartum hormones.

Clearly, Neiderman wrote this before the days of Google, but surely he could have found a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting somewhere during the writing of this book.

Do your research, bro!

A Tragic Death

Best part: Dawn and Jimmy return to the Cutler’s Cove Resort to find that Grandmother Cutler has suffered a stroke and is in hospital. They head on over. Dawn pleads to know where Grandmother Cutler sent the baby. Then this happens:

She closed and opened her mouth again, this time producing sounds. I knelt closer to understand and brought my ear to her lips. It was mostly gurgling in her throat, but I began to make out some words.

She uttered them and then closed her eyes and turned away. The heart monitor began a high-pitched, monotonous ring.

“Why?” I cried. “Why?“

So that’s the death scene.

I’ve noticed that Neiderman’s “final confrontation” scenes frequently end this way. Even the one where Dawn reams out Miss Emily before leaving The Meadows is pretty lackluster. They lack in tension and often fall flat, and as a reader, I can’t help but look up from the pages and scream into the ceiling.

WHY? WHY?

Incest!

As if there weren’t enough shocks in this book, Dawn gets called back to the reading of Grandmother Cutler’s will. Inside, it reveals that Dawn’s missing father is actually her grandfather, who either raped or seduced Laura-Sue (Dawn’s biological mother). In a fit of grief, Dawn’s Daddy Grandpa wills 60% of the Cutler estate to Dawn.

Yay incest!

Some Really Bad Writing

There’s a lot of it, mostly relating to Dawn’s really flawed attitudes toward men and sex. Here’s a thought she has after playing checkers with Arthur Garwood, wherein he explains that his parents never have sex:

After he left I thought about the things he told me. Why would a man and woman live together as husband and wife is one of them didn’t want to touch each other or be touched? Wasn’t sex a way of bringing yourself as close to another person, a person you loved, as could be? And why would a woman be so frightened of it? Was it just her fear of becoming pregnant? How confusing and complicated the world was once you leave that realm in which you dwelt as a child, I thought. You lived in a bubble until one day the bubble burst and you were forced to look around and see that pain and suffering were not part of some make believe that would disappear in the blink of an eye.

SERIOUSLY, Dawn? For real? You lived through all the horrible stuff in your first book and you didn’t know this? Your mother cheated on your father (who didn’t turn out to be your father but is your step-father). Your mother and step-father NEVER bone. Your half-brother literally raped you. Your family is whack, and you still think sex is some kind of fairy tale?

Near the book’s climax, Dawn hits her breaking point during her stay at The Meadows, and she writes a letter to Trisha and tries to run away in the middle of a snowstorm to mail it at the nearby town. Wearing only her cotton gown and blanket (clutched to her bosom!), Dawn follows the ONLY road leading away from the estate and still somehow manages to get lost:

It had grown so dark so quickly, I thought. Was I heading in the right direction? My panic grew. I started in one direction and then stopped and started in another. Then, terrified I was lost and would die in the cold. I broke into a trot, my stomach bouncing so hard, I had to keep my hands under it and consequently lost my blanket off my shoulders. But I didn’t stop to retrieve it. I kept running and running and running. My foot got stuck in a soft part of the road and when I pulled up, it came right out of my shoe. It seemed as if the very earth were trying to swallow me up. I was too panicked I didn’t even notice I was running with a bare right foot. I ran on and on until I was gasping for breath and had to stop. Then, clutching my stomach, the pain excruciating everywhere on my body, I fell on my knees and sobbed and sobbed.

Luther pulls up in his truck and drives Dawn back to the house, which is just a “few hundred yards” away. I just… why does she need to be this pathetic? I realize that writers need to be cruel to their characters for tension’s sake, but Neiderman could have at least had a bit of respect for Dawn and given her the damn dignity to make it a mile or two before crumbling.

Lastly, it wouldn’t be a V.C. Andrews book without some bosom references coupled with some very dated-sounding fashion choices:

My heart was so full of happiness, I thought it was sure to burst. I had packed some things in my suitcase in anticipation of Michael and I having a night like this. Trisha had gone with me to buy an uplift bra. My deepened cleavage and my surging bosom made me look years older. I couldn’t help the blush that settled at the entrance to the valley between my breasts, but I thought that made me look even more enticing in my black V-neck, three-quarter-sleeve dress. The tiny diamonds on my locket sparkled on my chest.

Fantastic Psychological Horror

I can’t so much call the horror in his book “psychological” because Dawn never finds herself inherently trapped. Some of the events at The Meadows feel terrifying in that the estate is so remote and without modern utilities that Dawn literally has no choice but to wait things out. It’s just frustrating that once she does decide to leave that she doesn’t use an iota of brains and think, “Hey, Maybe I’ll steal Luther’s keys and drive the truck out!”

Her stupidity overpowers the horror.

My Final Thoughts

This was a frustrating read, to say the least. New York isn’t much of a V.C. Andrews setting and over half of the book takes place there. Dawn’s also a major idiot, and while it’s kind of “satisfying” that she has to deal with her mistakes, the stuff at the Meadows is just beyond. Long story short, I definitely felt the emotional turmoil roller coaster, which is kind of what these books are supposed to do.

Thumbs up?

The post SECRETS OF THE MORNING – A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review appeared first on REBECCAJONESHOWE.COM.

Why I’m Quitting Fast Fashion

I’ve thinking about quitting fast fashion for a while, but that shit requires commitment. Sometimes you just need a kick in the face, and I finally got it.

Back in summer, I needed a white dress. I found a white dress. (NOTE: I didn’t buy it from the site listed. I got it from Hudson’s Bay.) Regular price, it was $69.99 CDN, but it was on sale for $27.99. When it arrived? Well, let me show you this cheap piece of garbage:

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It was also too small. I wanted to buy a Large but they were sold out, so I settled for a Medium because I knew I’d fit into it eventually. While I’ve been steadily losing all my pregnancy weight, I still couldn’t pull this thing over my chest. Why? BECAUSE THERE IS NO ZIPPER. THIS DRESS IS MADE OF NON-STRETCHY FABRIC AND IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A BLOODY SIDE ZIPPER TO MAKE IT EASY TO PUT ON.

This dress was easily the trigger. I’m pulling it. I’m quitting fast fashion for real this time.

What Is Fast Fashion?

Fast fashion is essentially a business model wherein brand names like Zara, H&M, ASOS, Topshop, (and Dex, which made my shitty garbage no-zipper dress), mass-produce trendy clothing on a quick time frame.

Fast fashion produces clothing with cheap fabrics. They’re sold on the cheap (and also not-so-cheap) to customers who wear it in the short time-span while the clothing (the design of which is based on current runway trends) is trendy.

Think of that velvet jumpsuit that you can see your underwear through when you bend over. Or that jungle print blazer with no lining. Or that jacket that Melania Trump wore. So you buy it and wear it. Then you toss it into that diabetes donation bin. Then it’s sent to some third-world country where nobody buys it and it gets tossed in this massive pile of garbage clothes that kids get to use as a “playground” full of mud and mold and disease because all the fabric is made of polyester and won’t biodegrade.

This documentary on Netflix is a great place to start your rage:

Quitting Fast Fashion Is HARD

Last year I bought this amazing green blazer for $39.99.

The blazer came in green AND pink and I wanted both but I settled for the green. I wore the green blazer. People complimented me. I came up with all sorts of new outfit ideas. I found a new style. I could pull off blazers, people!

Then I went back and bought the pink blazer.

The next week, the same blazer arrived in the store in blue. I also bought some more tops to match my three lovely blazers. I do still wear them, but now I’m addicted.

The next year, I found a violet blazer.

Yes, I bought the stupid thing.

A red one also arrived but I was like, YOU NEED TO STOP THIS. YOU CAN’T BUY IT.

I didn’t buy it but I really really really regret not buying it, despite the fact that I probably wouldn’t have worn it much because I’m not the biggest fan of red. I really just wanted to “RepliKate” (it’s a thing) this Kate Middleton look.

Clothing addiction is all about dream aesthetics. I’ve got a ton of clothes, but then I’ll see a new outfit or a new brand or a new Kate Middleton picture and the waves part like the Red Sea and I walk through toward a new identity. A NEW ME. And dang, if that feeling isn’t addictive AF.

Sometimes I’ll get the item in the mail and I’ll love it. People will compliment me. And then, well, I go out and try to replicate that feeling with another new piece of clothing. It’s a cycle. It’s never-ending. And that’s the trap that plenty of us fall into.

Don’t feel bad. It’s the way we’re programmed and capitalism has found out how to manipulate us to consume products at ridiculous rates, churning out shitty velvet dresses after shitty suede culottes after shitty crochet crop tops.

Resources for Quitting Fast Fashion

YouTube has plenty of resources for a quick education in fast fashion. I’ve gravitated toward fashion designer Justine Leconte’s videos. Her channel is full of practical fashion goodness, and she does have a #FASHIONTALK playlist wherein she speaks mostly about the fast fashion industry and how to quit giving into it. She also has a playlist on finding quality clothing that I’ve found very useful. Here’s one video from that playlist on how to tell which clothes are “fast fashion” while you’re shopping:

I’ve also been browsing goodonyou.eco, which is a website all about sustainable and ethical fashion. They have a mobile app as well, which has proven to be a great resource for me. Plug all your favourite brands into the app and you’ll have a clear picture of their practices on a 1-5 scale based on Labour, Environment, and Animal Rights.

Some brand ratings were obvious to me. Others I was surprised by. One in particular is my favourite handbag brand, Matt & Nat, which prides itself on its “vegan leather” (for fuck’s sake, just call it what it is: PLEATHER.) While regularly perceived as a brand that’s “good”, it really only succeeds on Animal Rights. While the official Mat & Nat site says a lot of pretty things about their “Ethics and Sustainability”, the Good On You assessment is pretty thorough about the things Matt & Nat isn’t being transparent about. So yeah, probably not gonna be buying from them in the future.

[image error]A screenshot of the Good On You app.

The only downside I’ve found with this app has been its lack of indie brands, specifically retro ones. I love Hell Bunny, Collectif, Sugarhill Brighton, Sourpuss, etc. I’m hoping at some point that Good On You will address the brands in the retro reproduction community. It’s my main shopping destination and I’d love to make more informed shopping decisions when it comes to their ethical standards.

My Plan for Quitting Fast Fashion



Recreate Styles

I follow a lot of brands on Instagram. I have a tough time scrolling past a new clothing collection post without checking the site for all the pieces. Recently, I discovered Sister Jane, the most whimsical brand with the most amazing dresses. I wanted to buy everything, and I did end up buying this amazing cornflower blue dress for my collection.

Their pieces are pricey but they’re still made in China, and the brand only has 1/5 stars on Good On You. The next time I spend $170 on a dress, it’s gonna be on a more ethically-produced one. So while I love their aesthetic, I know that I can recreate the “Sister Jane look” with clothes in my own wardrobe. Here’s one I recently put together for church:

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A post shared by Rebecca Jones-Howe (@rebeccajoneshowe) on Aug 11, 2019 at 2:45pm PDT

Save Purchases for Quality Timeless Pieces

Of course, in my desire to stop buying clothes, I found new places to buy new clothes. I like People Tree and House of Foxy and Christy Dawn. Haven’t bought anything yet but when I do have a couple hundred bucks lying around for a nice wardrobe staple, I know where I’ll be headed.

Buy Vintage

I’ve recently delved into this pool of goodness. During the summer, I went to a Guts Club popup in Kamloops and scored some really pretty dresses. Since following the Guts Club Instagram account I’ve been flooded with sponsored ads that I actually want to click on (and follow!). Some shops I really like and have already purchased from are Curious Jane Vintage, Wildways Vintage and Clothesline Vintage. (All are Canadian vintage shops, as I try to shop local for cheaper shipping.)

Granted, when buying vintage, you’re paying a lot for an old piece of clothing, but one thing I LOVE about vintage boutiques is that it’s all curated, which means that you know exactly what you’re getting. Each shop has its own aesthetic, be it rustic or retro or romantic. No digging through racks! You’re paying for the curation and also supporting a small business to boot. #ladiessupportingladies

Make My Own Clothes

I’ve always wanted to do this. I have a sewing machine. I sort of have the skills. I’ve made the odd piece of clothing before but honestly, I just can’t commit to the time it takes to do it right. Writing takes up too much of my hobby time and I don’t have a lot of hobby time to sacrifice these days.

Still, making my own clothes is a dream that I will always have, and maybe when my kids are older I can properly devote a day or two to make myself a kickass vintage dress. A woman can still dream.

Take the Challenge!

I’m gonna do my best with quitting fast fashion. I like to think that I’ll be saving myself money, and I haven’t taken to buying myself any new clothes since I started writing this blog in the middle of summer. I have, however, definitely found myself headed back to the thrift stores a lot. I’ve also spend far too much of my time browsing vintage shops and sustainable boutiques online, but I guess my heart is in the right place.

What about you? Were you aware of the effects of fast fashion? Have you ever thought about where your clothes are made? Like me, have you found it difficult to quit fast fashion? And lastly, will you join me in my quest to stop buying cheap shitty garbage clothes?

The post Why I’m Quitting Fast Fashion appeared first on REBECCAJONESHOWE.COM.

FALLING STARS – A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review

Alas, I am here to review the final book in the Shooting Stars mini-series, Falling Stars. Cinnamon, Ice, Rose and Honey finally have a chance at fulfilling their dreams in the Senetsky School of Peforming Arts. While I can’t say that it’s exactly been a ride, I’m excited to delve into this last adventure that actually takes place in a proper V.C. Andrews setting.

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE — BUT WHAT IF THE PLAY DOESN’T GO AS PLANNED?

Four talented girls from vastly different pasts share a dream of stardom: Cinnamon, the edgy actress; Ice, the phenomenal vocalist; Rose, the beautiful dancer; and Honey, the first-rate violinist. The four meet at the prestigious Senetsky School of the Performing Arts — housed in an ornate New York City mansion — and become instant friends as they take off on a dazzling whirlwind of intense classes, theater outings, and celebrity-studded parties.

But they soon realize this is no ordinary school. Madame Senetsky pushes the girls’ studies beyond reason. She controls their social lives. And they get the strange feeling someone is watching them. But who… and why?

Cinnamon, Ice, Rose, and Honey set out to untangle a shadowy web of Senetsky family secrets. As they explore dark corners and hidden rooms, every creak and moan of the old mansion tells a story too frightening to repeat. A devastating story that can destroy their dreams…

About the Book

Unlike the other books in the Shooting Stars series, this one has the classic V.C. Andrews keyhole and step-back cover (one of the last that the V.C. Andrews brand featured before the keyhole was done with due to expense). This one’s a great gem because it features not one, but THREE KEYHOLES! Flip the cover open and it reveals the four girls. I can recognize Ice and Cinnamon on the left, but I’ve no idea who the girls on the right are, because neither of them resemble the illustrations of Rose and Honey on the covers of their books. In the middle are two characters, a blonde-haired woman and a fair-haired man (Gerta and Edmond, but we’ll get to that).

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Falling Stars is narrated exclusively by Honey, who is probably the most boring of the four girls in the series. While boring, I suppose her voice does ring the V.C. Andrews narration style the best. Honestly, I feel that Rose would have made a better narrator, as many incidents happen to Rose in this book and readers don’t get to experience those incidents though her perspective.

My Copy

I got my copy of Falling Stars from a used book store and was fortunate to find one in good condition (for a mass-market paperback, that is). The front cover has some slight creases and the keyhole is slightly damaged, but overall the book is in good shape. There’s a faint spine crease. The pages are still crisp and white. To be honest, I felt bad folding down the corners of pages with quotes I’d planned on featuring in this review.

The Review

This book is a bit of a mess because Honey doesn’t just tell her own story, but also the past and current tales of the other three girls in the series. It’s Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants in a New York estate house and but told through the lamest character. BUT, how does this hold up to the V.C. Andrews formula?

An Innocent & Pretty, Yet Completely Naive Female Protagonist

Once again, we’re living life with Honey, the Ohio farm-girl who started dating a dude but got all freaked out because her ultra-religious grandfather wasn’t chill with it. I do wonder if Neiderman framed Falling Stars through her perspective because she’s the only character who hasn’t lived in an urban setting and hasn’t had much experience beyond her farm life.

Still, though? Her flashback “trauma” from the farm barely haunts her. Chandler visits once and they have sex in her room, which is against the rules. Then Honey stupidly goes to this hot dude’s apartment to listen to music (and he OF COURSE tries to rape her). Memories of Grandad Forman condemning for her sinful desires come rearing their ugly head. Fortunately, big city life keeps Honey’s paranoia at bay.

Here’s a little snippet of Honey’s very limited perspective of their girl squad:

We were truly becoming sisters, looking after each other. We were really becoming a team. Each of us lent something to the others, I thought. Cinnamon was our wit. Ice our muscle. Rose our beautiful face. And me? I was our conscience.

Man, what a backhand at Rose. Also, Ice really falls into the background in this book. She makes a lot of out-of-characters quips but that’s about it. Also of note is that Cinnamon is referenced to have black hair and heavy (goth) makeup, which doesn’t match her appearance on her book cover.

A Vivid Gothic Setting

The Senetsky School is a large Chateauesque mansion in the middle of New York City, likened to that of the Vanderbilt Mansion. Laura Fairchild, who is Madame Senetsky’s personal assistant, gives Honey and her parents the tour of the three-floor mansion.

The school itself is on the house’s main floor. Student bedrooms (large and elaborate) are on the second. The third floor holds the mysterious costume room, and also the wing of the house where Madame Senetsky lives. Laura Fairchild tells the students that they are NEVER TO GO THERE FOR FEAR OF GETTING KICKED OUT OF THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD.

Honey’s dad, specifically, gawks at the home’s fortress-like appearance, mentioning its gates, bars and — we’ll get back to this later — video security. Shortly after Honey’s parents leave, Honey meets a fellow student, Steven (who dresses like your standard emo kid in 2001) but is a piano God, apparently. Steven pounds on the wall of her bedroom and explains that sound can’t travel in the house. They then move about the student rooms and meet Cinnamon, Ice, Rose, and another boy, Howard, an arrogant actor convinced of his greatness who I could only picture one way:

A Hostile Maternal Figure (+ Bonus Mean Girl!)

When the students meet Madame Senetsky the first time, they’re given “behavior contracts” to sign. They’re forbidden from going out late and drinking and participating in unsavory activities (ie. boning). They’re to dress appropriately and not make the Senetsky school look bad, otherwise they’ll be kicked out immediately.

Later one, after discovering that Honey’s got a serious boyfriend, Madame Senetsky gets all creepy with Honey, telling her to save her virginity (she can tell Honey’s a virgin just by looking at her) because virginity is power. For some reason, she never gets this angry at Rose for dating Barry.

Despite all this, Madame Senetsky isn’t seen other than to give the students the odd three-page lecture on what life in show-business is like.

The legit mean girl in this book is Laura Fairchild, who’s always there to just add a snipe-y comment or two, but she’s never around to actually fall through when the girls sneak around the house.

The girls soon discover that somebody’s out there on the fire escape at night, spying on Rose and Honey and stealing their clothes. The girls attempt to have numerous sleepover reconnaissance missions to get to the bottom of it. They soon realize that whoever is stealing their clothes lives in the forbidden upstairs area of the house.

At first they think that it’s Edmond Senetsky, who Madame Senetsky’s adult son, but upon climbing the fire escape ladder and peering into the window into the forbidden suite, they discover that the man is actually a woman covering her chest with a bandage, Mulan-style.

A Tragic Death

In the scene where Madame Senetsky gets all weird with Honey’s virginity, Madame Senetsky also reveals to Honey that she had a daughter who died. This information isn’t exactly public knowledge, so Rose emails her brother Evan (who the book constantly needs to remind you is paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair) to do some SERIOUS cyber-sleuthing.

“This was one of the hardest, most difficult searches I’ve undertaken through the Internet,” Evan began. “Roadways into places I had to get to were blocked with passwords I didn’t have time to break. I had to figure out ways to get around and come in back doors.”

Evan tells them that Madame Senetsky married late in life to a man named Marshall Senetsky. Through they rarely spent much time together during their marriage (Madame was a big star at the time), they still had two children, Edmond, and Gerta. Little is known of Gerta, save for the fact that she was admitted to a clinic for disturbed children in Switzerland at the age of 14. Evan finds news of her death in a newspaper clipping.

So it’s a death, but not really a death, because it’s Gerta that’s living upstairs and it’s Gerta that’s on the step-back cover! Mystery solved! The girls take to leave his hotel room, but not without another nod to the fact that Evan’s in a wheelchair:

“Is there anything you need before we go?”

“No, I’m fine here. As you can see,” he said, gesturing toward the bathroom, “it’s all designed for the disabled.”

“You’re far less disabled than most of the boys I know,” Cinnamon told him, which brought a smile back to his tired face.

Like, I know it’s 2001 here, but being a person with a disability is not Evan’s character quirk. He’s a potential misogynist and will probably be doxxing girls like Cinnamon in about 15 years. Just wait and see.

A Beloved Doting Paternal Figure

The girls decide to throw all fucks to the wind and climb into Gerta’s third-floor prison cell to discover that she’s a grown-as woman with the mind of a 7-year old. The first night they play some creepy kids’ games with some equally-creepy rhymes. The next night she’s dressed as a man to escape her “feminine” self, and she tells the girls in third-person about her father, Marshall and exactly just the kind of man he was:

“He made her his Gerta Berta. When she had nightmares and she went to him, he showed her how to forget them, but that wasn’t nice. Her body lied again. Her body thought it was nice.”

Gerta has an abundance of men’s clothing because Laura Fairchild and Madame Senetsky refuse to buy her woman’s clothes. Sometimes she takes the dresses in the costume room (through a secret door, the key to which is hung up beside the door from the school side), but if she doesn’t put them back, Laura Fairchild cuts her hair off.

Nearly being discovered, the girls sneak out the window and Laura Fairchild locks it behind them, cutting off their access to Gerta.

Incest!

There’s some off-the-page incest and that’s about it. But if we wanna get to some messed-up sex, we only need to read a bit further to the part where Howard takes notice of the girls’ hushed whispering. Cinnamon (the leader of the group) tells him that Honey’s out cheating on Chandler with some other guy, but even Howard sees past her “acting”.

The girls eventually give up the secret and Howard goes up with them during their next visit to Gerta’s suite, this time through the secret door in the costume room. Gerta’s starts reciting lines from Shakespeare plays by heart, and Howard is shocked at her knowledge and wants to stick around.

The next time the girls visit, they find Howard leaving the room. They enter the room and find Gerta naked in her bed. So not only is Howard a great actor, he’s also an abuser of the psychologically traumatized.

Some Good Olde School Misogyny

As I mentioned before, there’s a scene were the girls go out with Rose’s boyfriend Barry and a few of Barry’s friends. One of those friends is a guy named Tony, who Honey claims is really attractive. Attractive enough to make her forget about her “serious boyfriend” Chandler so she can go and check out his surround sound speaker in his apartment that overlooks the East River.

Now, the readers all see it coming, but Tony gets Honey a drink and tries to get her to stick around even though she’s pretty clearly uncomfortable and unimpressed. He gets her onto the patio so she can check out the view. Then this happens:

I guess my eyes brightened, and that encouraged him enough for him to take the liberty of bringing his lips to mine before I could even prepare for a kiss. It wasn’t a long kiss, just a smack on the mouth, more like a firecracker.

“Sorry, but I had to do that,” he said. “You look so fresh. Hope you’re not mad.”

She isn’t at first. She tries to tell him that she doesn’t want the Bloody Mary he forces her to drink. He then tries to take advantage of her “freshness” with his spider hands (Andrew Neiderman’s favourite visual for sex scenes!). She eventually nuts him in the elevator and heads back to the school.

I’ll admit there isn’t much misogyny except for the strange infatuation with Rose and her beauty. Rose, perhaps the most undeserving of the school kids, didn’t even need to audition for her place in the Senetsky School. She’s not even a classically-trained dancer. Legit, a fucking high school teacher taught her all she knows. She got into the Senetsky School because Edmond Senetsky is allowed to permit one person into the school on sight, and yeah, he chose the beautiful and magical and most Mary-Sue character ever, Rose.

Howard makes fun of Rose for this, but the girls stick up for her. Oddly enough, the whole “Edmond Senetsky” plot doesn’t really go anywhere. He appears once or twice and creepily looks at Rose, but nothing further is made of this, despite being a noted part of the book early on.

Near the end of the book, once again, Rose is somehow the magical solution to all of Evan’s woes in his pitiful crippled life. In her summary of Rose’s background and character, Honey says this:

“Ironicaly, however, all this brought Rose closer to her handicapped brother, and together they found a way for her to develop her dancing talent and defeat Charlotte’s revenge. A child of betrayals, Rose cold never betray Evan’s efforts, for he saw his own validation in her successes.”

WTF?! Like why is she some kind of vessel for Evan? I hate this. I hate it so much.

A Rags to Riches Plot

While the girls get to live in a fancy mansion, it doesn’t do much for their situations back at home at home:

Honey: Her parents keep running a farm and her dad owns a Lincoln Towncar now.
Ice: Her mother leaves her father and never returns. (Yay!)
Rose: Her mother meets a new dude and marries him in Vegas.
Cinnamon: Her dad still has a pacemaker.

At the book’s finale, the girls sneak Gerta onto the stage of the big final Performance Night in front of all the big-wig agents, managers and producers. Gerta takes the place of Cinnamon in a Shakespeare scene with Howard and Madame Senetsky is forced to face the impact of locking her own daughter away.

Howard the rapist is kicked out of the school (but not sent to jail, because of course) and everyone else gets a potential lead to a future of fame, which, if recent years and the #metoo movement have proved anything, will not be all that bright for women in the entertainment industry.

Some Really Bad Writing

I’ll start by citing my qualms with a common thing that happens in this book. One character says something stupid (usually one of the boys), and one the girls makes a lame quip. Then they all laugh. Example:

“Where’s Howard?” Steven asked, following.

“Probably stuck on his face in the mirror,” Cinnamon said.

Rose and Ice laughed harder than I did.

This happens MULTIPLE TIMES. I realize that girls are gonna gab but listening to this same dialogue formula over and over really gave off some hardcore sitcom vibes.

One common V.C. Andrews gimmick is over-writing, and boy oh boy does this book have a lot of examples of that. In this scene, Honey first gets a taste of Steven’s sweet piano SKILLZ, there’s even some Stephanie Meyer thesaurus abuse:

His fingers floated over the keys as if they each has a mind of their own, and when he played, all the impishness in his face, all his lackadaisical expression disappeared. It was truly a wonder to watch is body metamorphose into someone so different from the carefree boy I was getting to know away from the piano. The instrument, the notes he played invaded his body and even his soul.

Relax, Honey. He’s not like Chilly Gonzales or anything. I’m just saying that you haven’t seen a guy play piano until you’ve seen a guy sweat buckets over a piano while wearing slippers and a luxury bathrobe.

Trust me, just watch this. He’s a musical genius and he will change your life. He even as an ORCHESTRAL RAP ALBUM.

Another V.C. Andrews staple is the overwritten passage WITH an extended metaphor. There are plenty of examples in this book, but here’s one of my faves where Honey’s doing her last performance in the book:

I raised my bow and the music came, as it always did. I played as if I was trying to keep Death himself at bay. I could charm the devil. It was almost as if the violin was truly connected to my very soul. I didn’t think about it. I was like a tightrope walker who never looked down, but just kept his eyes forward, his concentration fixed to the goal, the finale, but I did sense how well I was playing. I could feel every note.

I honestly don’t understand how people read this stuff without the eye-roll. Now, instead of feeling Honey in her happy place, I’m just thinking about that Nathan For You episode (that I couldn’t get a GIF or a video of) where he disguises himself as an overweight man so he can walk across a tightrope to both impress a girl he met online while also raising money for breast cancer. I’m not even thinking of Honey or her music at all.

Fantastic Psychological Horror

Honestly, in light of everything, Neiderman did a decent job of piecing a V.C. Andrews plot together within the confines of the “mini-series” setup. I doubt many V.C. Andrews fans really like the mini-series formula all that much. I think it held up to some degree. That said, most of the revelations and shock and awe didn’t come until the later portions of the book, so the bulk of it (about three quarters) was just about some teenagers in a school.

Mediocre, at best.

My Final Rating

This book didn’t exactly get decent until the second half, when the plot finally kicked in. There’s a lot of teenage banter, the standard girl talk scenes, some romance scenes, etc. It’s all standard 2001 young adult lit. (I am aware that mid 2000’s V.C. Andrews books catered more toward teenagers than adults, so a lot of the more shocking elements were tamed down quite a bit to appeal to younger audience.

Gerta’s the focus of the cover, though and I really feel like this book could have been something along the lines of Flowers in the Attic were it told from Gerta’s perspective. I mean, we don’t even get to find out what exactly happens to her after that show she’s thrown into. Madame Senetsky affirms that “changes will be made immediately” but we’ve no idea where Gerta goes or who takes care of her.

It’s troubling, to say the least. Ialso fail to understand how the girls managed to sneak around the mansion so much when the gates and bars and security were so prominently mentioned. And why was Gerta so freely able to sneak out of her portion of the house?

The post FALLING STARS – A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review appeared first on REBECCAJONESHOWE.COM.

HONEY: A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review

Here we are at the final individual novella in the Shooting Stars mini-series. These books have provided me with an easy escape from the tail-end of summer. Thus, I can admit that I’ve enjoyed hate-reading them. So let’s take one last deep-dive review into a hastily-plotted V.C. Andrews novel, Honey.

IN HER MUSIC, SHE FOUND SWEET SALVATION

Honey grew up on a farm under her strict, fanatically religious grandfather’s disapproving eye. To him, everything is a sin — from her natural-born talent for the violin to her innocent interest in boys and dating — and life is a treacherous path to be walked in fear. When Honey is paired for music practice with a brilliant piano student, wealthy Chandler Maxwell, she discovers a true soul mate. But when a shocking family secret comes to light, Honey discovers the starling cause of her grandfather’s bitter fury. And her own precious joy be lost forever…

About the Book

As I’ve mentioned already, Honey is the 4th and final individual protagonist’s story in the Shooting Stars series. The Goodreads reviews state that it was worse than others. While the book’s setting and family-drama take place in a V.C. Andrews universe, its condensed plot mainly consists of a dumb relationship.

Happy late 90’s – early 00’s teen movie throwback, everyone!

Honey even has the same bad bangs as 2002 Mandy Moore.









My Copy

My copy of Honey is in pretty similar condition to the other books I own in the series. (I got the first 4 books at the same thrift store, all likely owned by the same reader.) One-handed reading took its toll on the bottom binding. There’s one spine crease. The top right corner of the book dons a pretty visible crease.

There’s something I really like about reading low-quality mass-market paperbacks. I’ve always been careful with my books. Owning some beat-up ones has helped me appreciate the worn-in features of each book. On the plus side, I added to their stories by reading them in the bath, giving their pages that nice swollen look from the steam.

The Review

The bulk of pretty much every other novel in the Shooting Stars series (aside from Cinnamon) centers around a relationship. Ice had Balwin. Rose had Barry. Honey is no exception in that her relationship with Chandler is pretty much the entirety of the book’s plot. While family tension DOES exist within the pages, the tension fails to live up to typical V.C. Andrews standards.

An Innocent & Pretty, Yet Completely Naive Female Protagonist

Honey Forman is a high school senior who lives on a family farm in Ohio and plays the violin. She’s an only child to her father, Issac, and her mother, a Russian immigrant who talks a lot about being a Russian immigrant. Honey’s pretty strong in that she speaks her mind and has some good quips form time to time. Her “special talent” is playing the violin. Unlike other protagonists in this series (looking at you Cinnamon and Rose!), she is actually professionally-trained in her skillset.

I will give Andrew Neiderman (V.C. Andrews’s posthumous ghostwriter) an ounce of credit for at least attempting to make Honey a protagonist who has her head on her shoulders. She has a few good quips and take-downs in this book. While she does have herself a good cry from time to time, she thankfully isn’t a sob-fiend like professional waterworks machine, Dawn Cutler.

Also of note is that Honey gets mocked for her name. I only point this out because Cinnamon never received the same kind of treatment. Even Rose got some mockery, for shit’s sake, and she’s got the most normal name of the lot.

Mom named me Honey because of my naturally light-brown complexion and the honey colour of my hair and my eyes. I understood Grandad Forman immediately let it be known that he didn’t think it was proper, but Mommy was able to put up a strong wall of resistance and brush off his tirade of threats and commands.

Like mother, like daughter, I guess?

A Tragic Death

This book kicks off with the death of Honey’s most-favourite uncle ever, Uncle Peter. As readers, we don’t get to experience the death, but rather, we get to hear about it when Honey explains (in beginning-of-the-book flashback exposition) that his crop duster went down and the whole family was really sad about it, save for Grandad Forman, who doesn’t process his pain because he’s too close to God or whatever.

Uncle Peter was the one who gifted Honey her prized violin and encouraged her to play. Honey spends the entire first chapter talking about him and the family’s history. Other than the fact that the whole family’s sad, this plot point doesn’t do much to really kick the story into motion.

A Beloved Doting Paternal Figure

Honey doesn’t exactly bond with her father until chapter 3. This chapter also contains the first actual scene in the novel, wherein Honey talks with her dad about Uncle Peter’s death and about Uncle Simon, her father’s half-brother who Grandad has forced to live in the upper floor of the barn that holds the cows.

“Daddy”, otherwise known as Issac to those of us who can’t stand all the childish referencing to parents, is a pretty decent dude, but also isn’t quite the doting paternal figure that us V.C. Andrews fans have come to expect from dad characters.

Some Good Olde School Misogyny

Other than a few scenes where Grandad Forman accuses Honey of having intimate relations with her Uncle Peter, there’s not a lot of misogyny here. Even Grandad’s accusations aren’t so much misogynistic than they are your standard “over-zealous religious character going off on his moralistic soapbox” affair.

The boyfriend Chandler is respectable. He’s rich but super awkward because he’s rich, and when Honey first starts dating him, a bunch of her classmates make fun of her just for the sake of creating some semblance of tension.

There is, however, this great example of a white dude writing as a female in a classic “girl judging her body while looking in a mirror” scene:

I sat at my vanity table and stared at my image in the mirror, wondering if I was at all attractive. Was my nose too small, my lips too thing, my eyes too close together?

I stood up and began to undress, gazing at myself as I stripped down to bare skin. I had a figure people called perky, cute. Would I ever be beautiful? It seemed to me that boys didn’t take cute girls seriously, only the girls who were beautiful. I’d always look too young. When I once voiced such a complaint, Mommy told me to just wait twenty years. I’d love being considered too young then, but who wanted to wait so long to be happy about myself now.

I realized I was standing nude in front of my mirror and judging my breasts, my curves, and my wait. Was this sinful? Would I be punished for my vanity?

That last line particularly bugs me because she’s judging her breasts and her curves and her waist. Otherwise known as her fucking assets. Male gaze shit. In my teenage mirror-gazing sessions, I slouched my shoulders down in the most unappealing way possible and pushed out my gut until it was distended to max potential. Then I’d squeeze my stomach fat real hard in my fists and think YOU’RE SO FUCKING UGLY! YOU’LL NEVER LOOK GOOD IN LOW-RISE JEANS AND YOU’LL NEVER GET A BOYFRIEND, but I guess that kind of shit doesn’t turn on a middle-aged male writer trying to write as teenage girl, so what do I know?

Incest!

There is no incest in this one, but much like with Rose, there’s some weird family-oriented sexual tension that’s never explained. That sexual tension exists between Honey and her Uncle Simon, who is a “gentle soul” but also a rather large man who was the son of Grandad’s first wife, Tess. Tess’s husband died sometime after Simon’s birth and eventually married Grandad Foreman. After Tess died of breast cancer, Grandad did the traditional Christian thing and married Tess’s younger sister, Jennie (mother of Issac and Peter). When Jennie died of a heart attack, Grandad Forman moved Uncle Peter into the barn and forbid him from taking part in family activities.

Uncle Simon’s view from the barn also looks into Honey’s bedroom window, and after the stupid “girl looks at herself in the mirror” scene that I mentioned above, Honey realizes this:

Outside, the moon has just gone over the west side of the house. Like a giant yellow spotlight, it light up the barn and my step-uncle Simon’s window. He was sitting there, looking toward mine.

And I realized that I had left it wide open while I had been studying my naked body. Had he been there that entire time?

Incestuous voyeurism is another long-running V.C. Andrews trope that once again makes its self know for no other reason than to be shocking.

A Vivid Gothic Setting

The Forman property is an expansive 500-acre corn farm in Ohio. Everyone (aside from Uncle Simon) lives in a “turn-of-the-century two-story” house with a wraparound porch. It’s a classic home and a classic setting with the barn and the pretty flowers and stuff. While not exactly the gothic mansion we’re accustomed to seeing in V.C. Andrews novels, it did still lure my imagination a bit, as I’ve always been fond of farm-like settings.

A Hostile Maternal Figure (+ Bonus Mean Girl!)

Honey is lacking in this classic V.C. Andrews staple, so let’s just talk about Grandad Forman, who is pretty much inspired by Olivia Foxworth (the grandmother from Flowers in the Attic). He’s your standard fundamentalist Bible-thumper in that he’s judgmental of everyone around him and doesn’t go to church because “he’s got his own beliefs”.

Once Honey’s relationship with Chandler start to evolve, Grandad Forman’s always stumbling into their dates like an urban legend serial killer.

He rambles a lot about bloodlines, and honesty I thought I had the “twist” figured out that Uncle Peter was actually Honey’s dad (which would have made his references in the book the least bit significant, but noooooooooo). We find out in the book’s climax — when Uncle Simon’s trying to murder Grandad for destroying his flowers — that the deep family secret is that Grandad Forman is Uncle Simon’s REAL FATHER.

Grandad runs away instead of facing reality that at one point he impregnated a married woman (Tess) who ended up marrying him anyway. It’s such a bogus plot point that pretty much amounts to a great big WHO GIVES A FUCK?

A Rags to Riches Plot

After Simon learns the truth about who his father is, GranDAD Forman runs into the woods. Later, Issac goes into the woods and finds Grandad dead. After the funeral, the family discovers that Grandad was actually hiding a massive fortune and BOOM! the Forman’s are suddenly the richest family on the farming block.

Amish paradise, indeed.

Honey ultimately masters her audition to the Senetsky School of the Arts and her parents pay the admission fees with hoarded old person wealth. Huzzah!

Some Really Bad Writing

For what it’s worth, when Honey talks about how Uncle Peter’s death affects her, this classic example of Neiderman’s use of elaborate similes really conveys all her teen angst:

I didn’t watch television or listen to music and had no interest in going to the movies or on trips with anyone who asked, so they stopped asking. I felt like a balloon that had broken loose and was drifting in the wind aimlessly, carried in whatever direction the breeze was going, and slowly sinking into darkness.

Here’s another simile that Neiderman uses to show us just how nervous Honey is before her first date with Chandler:

Waiting for Chandler’s arrival, I was so nervous it felt like a small army of ants were parading up from my stomach to march around my drum-pounding heart.

There’s a strong use of insect imagery in this book, one of which I’m positive Neiderman forgot he already wrote once. Remember that horrific spider-inspired passage in the sex scene in Dawn? Eleven years later, it’s back!

Chandler’s right hand moved down behind my shoulder and under my sweater. His fingers and palm traveled like a hungry spider up to my bra clip, which he squeezed and undid so quickly, I barely had a chance to shake my head.

I’ve noticed that Neiderman’s sex scenes always start with a kiss and a lot of groping. This sex scene is two pages long and the word “breast” is used FIVE TIMES. First, Chandler’s hand grazes Honey’s breast. Then he reaches under her sweater and touches her breast. Then he feels under her bra and touches her naked breast. He takes off her bra and touches her breast with his left hand. Then, finally, Chandler lifts her sweater so he can put his lips to her breast. So much breast action in one sex scene. My breasts just can’t handle it!

After the date, Chandler drives Honey home. Grandad Forman accuses her of committing so much sin (though not specifically sin of the breasts). Honey storms off to her room and breaks into full-blown hysterics:

I simply threw myself on my bed and pressed my face into the pillow. Grandad’s horrible words circled me like insistent mosquitoes, biting and stinging. How could he harbor such ugly thoughts in his mind? How could he turn something that had been gentle and kind, loving and beautiful, into the most detestable and ugly ogre of smut and filth. I shook my body as if to throw off the stains.

Begone, sinful urges!





Fantastic Psychological Horror

As I said already, the entire premise of the book was pretty much shot with the “revelation” that Uncle Simon’s an actual son and not just a step-son. It just made me wish that Uncle Simon was the protagonist. Confined in a barn? Having a nurturing instinct for flowers? Watching a naked niece in her bedroom window? Trying to kill his bio-dad with a scythe?

There’s a decent story on this farm and it ain’t Honey’s.

My Final Rating

Every time I’ve finished one of these books I have a tough time figuring out which one was worse. Ice is clearly the standout book in this series, while the other three, Cinnamon, Rose and Honey, all try to adhere to V.C. Andrews tropes. They all fall flat. My ratings below still give Honey an edge. Apart from the boring romantic plot that takes up much of page count, there’s still enough interesting setting and family dynamics that save it from being truly worthless.

The post HONEY: A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review appeared first on REBECCAJONESHOWE.COM.

ROSE: A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review

We’re getting into the thick of the Shooting Stars mini-series, so if you haven’t checked out the first two books, Cinnamon and Ice, make sure you do! So let’s dive into my review of Rose, which promises a truer return to typical V.C. Andrews form. Here’s a look at the synopsis:

WHEN SHE DANCED, SHE COULD DREAM…

Beautiful and talented, Rose was the apple of her father’s eye. But when he is tragically taken from her, his carefully hidden secrets destroy the only life Rose has ever known–and lead her into a world of luxury unlike any she has imagined. Rose is whisked off to a prestigious private school, while her mother falls into a hateful whirlwind of wealth and greed. But a most unlikely person will show Rose the true meaning of family–and give her the courage to follow her dream…

About the Book

Rose is the third book in the Shooting Stars series. Out of the three books thus far, Rose is the most true to the V.C. Andrews protagonists: white, innocent, and naive. The book takes place in modern-day (early 00’s) Atlanta, Georgia. There are prominent references particularly to the emerging Internet culture at the time. Having spent my teenage years in the early aughts, I can attest that the references come off pretty dated.

My Copy

Compared to my copy of Cinnamon and Ice, Rose seems to have fared well in the hands of previous readers. It sports the standard spine creases and dog-eared edges. The cover, however, is creased from being opened all the way. I’m also missing the very first page that contains an excerpt and the updated list of all V.C. Andrews’ books. 

My 4-year-old daughter also gravitated heavily towards this book. It’s the one she pretends to read more than all my other books. Probably because it’s pink and shiny. It’s amusing so see her to drawn to the covers. There’s really something about them that draws its audience in. Even with the brand update in 1996 with the Logan series, the look really remains true to the aesthetic of “gothic horror”. 

Compare the look of these books to today’s modern V.C. Andrews covers that scream 2010’s forgettable teen lit. So forgettable. So cheap. Nothing a stock photo subscription and a few Photoshop presets can’t achieve, hey?

The Review

The other two books in the Shooting Stars series were both lackluster renditions of a V.C. Andrews tale. I think Ice did a better job of taking the formula and applying it to a new situation (a black character in an urban setting).

One of my main issues with this series is the plot being crammed into 9 chapters. Each book is around 180 pages, and that isn’t enough space to shove all the V.C. Andrews into these books. The “talent” aspect of each story, specifically, gets crammed into the tail-end of each plot. The last two chapters always feel hurried and summarized, instead of experienced by the protagonist. 

An Innocent & Pretty, Yet Completely Naive Female Protagonist

Rose Wallis is the ideal naive V.C. Andrews protag, but she has one major downfall, and that is that she has even less personality than the standard V.C. Andrew protag. Everyone around her speaks for her. Much of her self-worth comes from her father, and all of her doubts from her mother (who resembles Staples-brand bleached cardstock, but we’ll get to that later.) In the prologue, Rose talks about her fear of the boogeyman as a child. Now grown, she sees the boogeyman as a metaphor of the “evil” of other people.

Rose’s special trait is that she’s good at dancing. She’s never had lessons, yet her new teacher is sO ImpResSeD with her that she trains her every day to become amazing at dance. Even though she’s seventeen. And hasn’t had a single dance lesson in her life.

I’m gonna spoil the ending here guys: Rose is SOLIDLY COMMITTED TO SPARKLE MOTION, and it’s that solid commitment that gets her into the Senetsky School of Performing Arts. Like she doesn’t even have to audition. Madame Senetsky’s son watches her dance and just admits her to the damn school.

A Beloved Doting Paternal Figure

The first chapter is titled “Daddy”. It’s all about Rose’s dad and his influence over her. He even allows his the boss to fawns over her like a fucking pervert and the dad just goes along with it so she can win some cash.

Rose spends much of the first chapter talking about how whimsical and carefree her father’s is. He’s essentially the manic pixie dream girl of dad characters.

“There should only be happy tears anyway,” Daddy told me once. “What does crying get you? If you’re miserable, you’re defeating yourself. Laugh at life and you’ll always be on top of things, Rose.”





A Tragic Death

When Rose’s father doesn’t return from a hunting trip. her mother starts freaking out about not wanting to cook a duck so late at night. She convinces Rose to see a movies with some friends. Rose goes to the movie, yet she can’t help but worry about her father, so this dude Barry takes her home. Then the police arrive, Flowers in the Attic style, to tell them at dear old dad is dead.

Of course, this leaves naive Rose and her “good at being gorgeous” mother penniless. There’s speculation that Rose’s father, Charles, committed suicide, but that question is never answered. Turns out that Charles never payed his life insurance. It’s revealed that Charles was actually a real POS who couldn’t hold a job and moved the family around a lot AND also happened to cheat on his wife and have a secret son. For some reason, though, these revelations never shatter Rose’s opinion of her father. She continues to look fondly on him and blames all the family problems on her mom.

Here’s Rose’s thoughts on them not being able to pay for Charles’ funeral.

Why hadn’t she insisted on facing realities? Why hadn’t she seen to it these things were addressed? Why did she bury her head in the sand Daddy poured around us? I wanted to scream at her, demanding to know why she had put up with all of this irresponsibility.

Uh, maybe because your dad was a gas-lighting sociopath, Rose. Your situation isn’t gonna improve by harnessing blame on your poor bEaUTifUl mom.

A Rags to Riches Plot

OF COURSE, shortly after the death, a stranger comes knocking and it’s this woman named Charlotte Alden Curtis, the sort of rich woman who constantly hammers you in the face with her richness. She’s the sister of Angelica Curtis, the babe who Rose’s dad decided to have a nice tasty side treat with, right up until he got her pregnant.

See, Rose’s dad has an illegitimate son who also has a spinal abnormality and he’s confined to a wheelchair (ugh, we really gotta go down this path, because just you wait).

Charlotte, still young and rich (because marrying wealthy old dudes pays off, baby!), wants to have a social life but doesn’t want to spend her time taking care Evan, so she barges into Rose and her mother’s life so she can take advantage of their destitute state. She wants them to take care of Evan so she can go and cougar it up around Atlanta’s night scene.

A Vivid Gothic Setting

It doesn’t take much convincing to get Rose and her mother to head down to the Curtis Estate, a standard Southern mansion with Doric columns and such. Of note is a line where Rose focuses on some marble tables with “expensive-looking figurines” on them. Come on, Andrew Neiderman. You can describe architecture and oil paintings and “settees” (Neiderman’s third-favourite word after “breasts” and “bosom”) so well but you can’t do a simple Google search on some expensive figurines?

Just pick a Lldaro and describe it. It could even be a metaphor, FFS.

A Hostile Maternal Figure (+ Bonus Mean Girl!)

Clearly, Charlotte is supposed to be the mean maternal figure, but she doesn’t exactly function that way. What she ultimately does is steal Rose’s mother (who she insists Rose refer to as Monica so she doesn’t sound old). Charlotte’s pretty much a petty middle-aged woman with no friends who just wants a friend, so she just buys Rose’s mother, sorry, MONICA, a new trendy wardrobe and takes her about town to bang older rich dudes.

Charlotte gets all excited about Rose’s worry over mother’s behaviour. Monica, however, LOVES her new life and her hot clothes, and she forgets to pay attention to Rose’s dance recital and eventually runs away with some dude named Grover. Charlotte really wasn’t out to get a friend, but to play with Rose’s emotions by hitching up Monica with another man. It’s so very high school of her. She’s two characters in one, but her presence in the novel is pretty lackluster.

Here’s a scene where Rose confronts Charlotte about her mother not being in her room in the morning:

“Are you saying my mother spent the night with a man she has just met?”

“Your mother is a grown woman, Rose. Don’t you think you’re being a bit overly dramatic about this? She’s still a young woman. Let her enjoy what’s left of her youth and beauty. What she or any woman in her state doesn’t need is an anchor tied to her legs in the form of a neurotic daughter.”

“I’m not a neurotic daughter!”

So yeah, that’s the gist of it. Of course, Charlotte pissed me off but she didn’t have the same presence as Grandmother Cutler, for instance.

Incest!

Once again, there is no incest. Rose and Barry have a pretty strong relationship that doesn’t sway during the course of the novel, which is a surprise, even after Rose introduces Barry to her half-brother, Evan.

Evan is essentially your stereotypical “person in a wheelchair” character. He’s lonely and angry and refuses to speak to others. He spends all his time on the computer. Rose is forced to get to know him. She does a decent job getting him out of his shell, yet, character-wise, Evan remains nothing more than a cutout derived for sympathy. His disability is a plot device (a standard V.C. Andrews tactic, yes, but I’m an adult here and I’m trying to address the problematic aspects of his “character quirk”).

Here’s the thing. Evan’s a lonely teenage boy with an emerging sexuality. He spends pretty much all of his time on the computer. He’s on chat rooms. He manipulates photos of his aunt and puts them on naked women’s bodies, to Rose’s shock. He’s an angry “cripple” (he calls himself that) with spite for the world. I think we all know exactly what forums Evan would be flocking to in 2019.

In the book’s penultimate sex scene, Rose and Barry get it on in the living room. Then Rose hears a sound in the kitchen. She leaves to check on Evan and finds his bedroom door ajar. She peeks in and finds him sitting completely naked in front of the computer.

Numerous times in the book, Evan reminds Rose just how beautiful she is. It seems the only reason he enjoys spending time with her is because she’s “beautiful”. At one point, while he’s showing her how to use the Internet, Evan eavesdrops on his ex-online-girlfriend’s cyber-sex session with another individual, proving that Rose didn’t own a copy of *NSYNC’s hit album, No Strings Attached.

Some Good Olde School Misogyny

Rose really doesn’t have many qualities in this book other than her beauty. Her dancing only becomes significant in the long summarizing last chapter. Rose’s dad loves Rose for her beauty. Evan hangs out with Rose for her beauty. Rose says that when she was 11, her male teachers would flirt with her.

Rose’s mother enters her teenage daughter into a beauty contest run by her dad’s boss. Rose’s dad takes her, and doesn’t even flinch when his boss (who runs a car dealership) refers to her like this:

“She has the chassis. That’s for sure, Charles,” he said, drinking me in from head to foot, pausing over my breasts and my waist as if he was measuring me for a dress. “Nice bumpers and great chrome,” he added and quickly laughed. “You’re a beautiful girl, Rose. No wonder your father’s proud of you.”

Rose doesn’t win the beauty contest, but she’s so damn beautiful that people refer to her as the winner anyway. It’s a disgusting passage meant to read that way, but it does frustrate me how blatant the sexual harassment is in V.C. Andrews books. The men never get reprimanded for for their behavior, ESPECIALLY by all the weak-ass mom characters.

Some Really Bad Writing

My favourite thing about this book is the really dated references to technology. This book was published in 2001, right when the culture was changing, so I can assume that Neiderman is really writing from experience when he penned this rant from Charlotte about Evan’s obsession with his computer:

“The only thing that gets him excited is shopping at one of those electronics stores, and he doesn’t to that very much anymore either, because he’s able to do it all over the computer. Sometimes, I think he is turning into a computer.”

Evan’s disability is obviously utilized for pity-points. His self-deprecation doesn’t read authentic in that he’s always referring to himself as a “cripple” and or a “tragic accident”. He even runs a chatroom called “Invalids Anonymous”. I’m pretty sure that “invalid” was a dated term in 2001. I think “handicapped” was the term used then, so great job at showing your age, Neiderman.

Anyway, here’s Rose trying her best to “help” Evan with some condescending sap that pretty much invalidates his struggle as a person with a disability.

“I don’t think of you as a tragic accident, Evan. Look, I expect I’ll get to know you better, and maybe I won’t like you. Maybe you’re too bitter, so bitter that I won’t be able to help,” I said. “But from what I can see and what I’ve heard so far, you seem to be very intelligent. When I said I wasn’t sure I could help you as your tutor, I was thinking to myself that you’ve already taught yourself so much, you probably know more than I do even though I’m two years older than you.”

The whole “disabled character as a pity magnet” plot is pretty standard in fiction. And I know I’m ranting about a stupid retro V.C. Andrews book, but hey, part of the reason I’m doing these reviews is to address some of the problematic aspects that have bled through literature over the decades.

We need more representation of people with abilities in fiction. Luckily, we live in a wonderful day and age where people share a lot of their daily lives on YouTube, and I want to urge my fellow writers to utilize that shared experience when doing research and writing a character with a disability. One of my favourite YouTube vloggers is Anya Darlow, a UK woman who shares every aspect of her life as a T-12 complete paraplegic. Her content is so fun and eye-opening. It’s crazy all the stuff you don’t think about as an able-bodies person. Anya’s got a great sense of humour and a great sense of style too!

Fantastic Psychological Horror

There’s next to no conflict in this book. Even the sexual stuff with Evan gets pushed aside. At the end, it’s Evan and Barry who show up at Rose’s dance recital. Her mother disappears with a simple letter, but then it turns out that Grover abandoned Monica, leaving her to feel like the foolish idiot she is.

But hey, at least her character arc came full-circle, right?

My Final Rating

This feels like the worst book in the Shooting Stars series of the three I’ve read, though it’s the V.C. Andrews vibes that save it from being vaguely worse than Cinnamon. While it sticks to the V.C. Andrews formula, it’s limited length still suffocates the plot.

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5 Ways to Stop Hating Your Writing

We’ve all been there, in that point of writing where we just can’t write another word. Why? Because the writing is bad, oh so bad, worth destroying, please get the fucking kerosene and burn this shit down I’m the worst writer in the universe please cancel. Clearly, by being here, you’re looking for a quick way out, so here are my 5 ways to stop hating your writing.

Read Shitty Books

I’m talking drugstore paperbacks here. Pick out your chosen genre and buy a couple (especially if they’re from your local used bookstore!). Read them, and most of all, enjoy them! Why? Because despite despite the bad writing, despite the cliches and the plot holes, there was something magic about the book that convinced an agent somewhere to sign on the writer to write more books and make money. Isn’t that great? Despite all the awfulness, there was still something that allowed a writer to sell their passion? People still enjoyed it

So, while you might be shitting on your work, feel free to shit on somebody else’s while also recognizing that every bit of writing is worth reading.

I’m constantly doing it with V.C. Andrews now and I just. can’t. stop. She’s in my veins and she’s a constant reminder that even a trashy writer can be a ridiculously influential one.

Make A Playlist

If you really wanna live in your story, you need it with you at all times, and that means jamming some songs on a Spotify playlist and listening to it when you’re driving to work or making dinner or sitting in the tub. Music is a powerful thing, and with the right songs and the right mood, you’ll be more connected to your story and your characters.

I mean, Twilight wasn’t good, but Stephanie Meyer was pretty hardcore with her Twilight playlists. Building my own playlists for my work has become a ritual in my writing routine. While nerdy, it is a fun little touch, and it’s also kind of cool to give fans a little look into your psyche and (hopefully awesome) taste in music.

Start A Blog

Or a journal! Do whatever you can to just keep writing. Nobody even needs to read it, thought I do find that when I write about myself that I have to take myself a little less seriously. This blog alone is a part of my writing process. Most nights when I can’t bear to edit my work anymore, I crack open my WordPress and ramble on about something.

Sometimes that something isn’t a post I end up publishing, but at least I spent my night writing, and that’s at least a night spent writing, which is much better than I night spent hating my writing, right?

PRO TIP: If you wanna start a journal, use the pronoun YOU for yourself, instead of I. The “you” term works really well in times of excessive turbulence. Go ahead and hate yourself for a while, you piece of shit writer. You hack. You useless, worthless, good for nothing writer. You keep on writing those hateful works. Because you hate yourself, don’t you? Don’t you want to get over it? Don’t you want to keep writing? Don’t you want to get over this hatred? Don’t you feel a little bit better, fleshing out this hatred? Don’t you want to go back to creating something again?

Write Another Damn Scene

Stuck on a particular scene? This is a problem I find myself in all the time. It’s easier to jump to another place in a short story than with a novel, but if you’re stuck, just leave yourself a reminder and move on. Use caps and bold and highlights as a reminder to return later.

If done right, your garbage scene will look something like:

Jared was having a tough time attempting to write. He just…he couldn’t. He made more coffee instead, opened up YouTube and found himself in a wormhole of urbex videos. He just had to watch another video taken in a very specific FUCK THIS IS SO BAD YOU GOTTA COME BACK TO THIS LATER!!!

Sometimes it’s tough to move out of sequence but fiction isn’t meant to be written like real-life. If you’re stuck on a scene, moving to the next might help you when you return. Remind yourself that you can always write another draft.

You can always go back.

You can always fix things.

Use Comic Sans

Or a similar font you loathe. One of my writer friends mentioned this on their Facebook. It’s a great tip, especially when you’re starting a new piece. The awfulness of the font allows you to overlook the awfulness of your writing. Just keep writing. In comic sans. Or Papyrus. Or one of these other universally hated fonts.

Self-judge your writing no more!

What do you do when you hate your writing?

Is this something that you struggle with? Got any tips that work for you? Feel free to share them in the comments!

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When #MOMLIFE and #WRITERLIFE Collide

Yesterday I managed to get my son to sleep for the afternoon. My daughter was spending the day at my parents’ and I had a wonderful moment of solace to drink a cup of coffee and listen to The Damage Report with John Iadarola. Then I got a text message from Richard Thomas:

Adding you to the call in about 10 minutes!

And I was like OH FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

A Little Backstory

Richard’s a fellow writer and a friend of mine who edited and published Vile Men. He also teaches some great online writing courses. In one of those courses, he teaches my street harassment story, “Cat Calls”. At some point he usually asks if I’m up to doing a Skype Q&A with the course participants.

I quite enjoy these calls. It’s one of the things you look forward to as a writer, is having people ask you questions about your own work and your methods. I find it so freeing to be so blunt. As a writer, it’s hard to talk about being a writer with your everyday friends, so having that small window to “be myself” is really thrilling. Usually, when Richard asks if I’m available, I set aside the time and I make myself presentable and set up my computer in nice a quiet room.

This time, he asked if I was available on Tuesday night and I said I totally was (because I’m on maternity leave and time is all I ever have). My husband would watch the kid and I’d lock myself in a room somewhere and spend an hour feeling like a legit writer.

BUT, by the time Tuesday came around I’d completely forgotten.

Being on maternity leave has turned my brain to mash. I don’t put dates on the calendar. I don’t pay attention to the clock. Most of my free time is spent crocheting with a teething baby on my lap while I watch that new Mighty Pups special of Paw Patrol on Netflix because it’s the only thing that keeps my 4 year-old daughter occupied when I’m dealing with a 5 month-old baby that won’t let me put him down. Most mornings I typically wake up when my daughter wakes me up and then I make breakfast and suddenly it’s like 6PM. I have one cup of coffee (a double Americano) in the morning and usually have another while making dinner.

So yeah, I forgot all about the Skype call.

Keep Calm and Skype On

My husband ended up working late so there was no one to look after my son, who was just waking up from his nap.

I scrambled to to get my computer set up, fretting over the fact that I had to do the chat in full Recluse-Mode: no makeup, hair in a pony, body swimming in an over-sized T-shirt. (My vanity usually doesn’t allow me to leave the house dressed any lower than a 7, so accepting that strangers were gonna be seeing me in my reclusive state felt pretty freeing, honesty.)

FUN FACT: When I don’t wear makeup, people always get shocked when they notice that I have freckles.

I ended up taking the call on my phone, which I had to prop up on a stack of very unstable V.C. Andrews paperbacks to avoid my face from getting that unflattering “middle-aged man taking a selfie” angle.

My son started crying immediately after the call started, so I had to bounce him on my lap the entire time I was answering questions about my writing process and my characters and my metaphors and inspirations. It was the first time my “mom life” and my “writer life” had ever collided in such full force.

The phone slipped off the stack of books a couple times. My husband tried calling me a couple times during the Skype chat (BECAUSE HE ALWAYS CALLS AT THE WORST TIMES) but I persevered. I’ve had worse “live chat” experiences in my life.

The best you can do is apologize and move on.

I apologized for the interrupting calls from the husband. I apologized for the baby crying. I did not, however, apologize for my appearance, because if one has such a luxury as maternal leave, one should take full advantage of the benefits.

The Takeway

Obviously, I need to write more shit on my calendar. I’ve tried keeping planners and bullet journals and all that shit, but the truth is that I’m just not a Type-A person. I hate carrying the extra weight of a planner in my purse. BUT, I do remember things when it’s on the family calendar, which is located in the hallway right in front of the bathroom.

So next time, when I take my morning dump with the door wide open (because kids) ALL I’ll ever take notice of is the calendar and this will NEVER happen again.

I hope.

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ICE: A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review

After reading Cinnamon, I can’t say that my expectations for the Shooting Stars mini-series were heightened any more than they were going in, but alas, considering that I got four of the five books in the series at the same thrift store (score!) for 50 cents a book, I basically have to commit. Ice is the second book in the series. Will it be any better? Let’s find out!

ICE WISHES SHE COULD JUST BECOME INVISIBLE…

Ice hides from the world behind a shield of silence. And this is what her mother hates about her. All she wants is a normal daughter who wears makeup and sexy clothes to attract boys. But Ice gets her chance to shine when she reveals her beautiful singing voice. And her extraordinary gift may become her saving grace when tragedy and deception almost destroy her dreams…

About the Book

If I’ve done my research right, I can tell you that Ice (we’ll get to the name later) is V.C. Andrews’ second black character (after Rain of the Hudson series). This post from The Complete Annotated V.C. Andrews Blog-O-Rama does a great job of illustrating Andrews’ troubles with diversifying her characters but the post doesn’t mention anything about Ice.

Most of the issues cited in the aforementioned blog post relate to the protagonist’s racial status always being a part of her character’s struggle. While race does contribute to a lot of struggles for many in real life, it doesn’t always mean it’s gonna produce great fiction. It’s frustrating when race is used as a plot device. I do just want to say that I struggle with white privilege, even as a bi-racial person. Like I’d be pissed if every novel with a half-Filipino woman always had a plot where she was pestered by white dudes who are weirdly obsessed with Filipinos.

I straddle both worlds. So, if I say anything that comes off racist in this review, please leave a comment below and I will be sure to approach your comment with a willingness to evolve my perspective.

My Copy

I’m pretty sure the same person owned all the copies of my Shooting Stars books (with the exception of the Falling Stars finale). My copy of Ice looks pretty similar in condition to my copy of Cinnamon, creased spine, worn corners and all. The bottom portion fo the binding is in really rough shape, however. The first 50 pages of the book are splitting away from the glue from normal reading. It’s obvious that these later productions of V.C. Andrews books were produced much more cheaply than earlier books.

Capitalism is one frustrating beast, indeed.

The Review

I can’t say that I had higher hopes for this book but I did expect it to be better than Cinnamon. Its premise promised some tragedy and deception, so let’s find out just how much of it there is.

An Innocent & Pretty, Yet Completely Naive Female Protagonist

The main character quirk with Ice (other than her ridiculous name) is that she’s an elective mute. She’s shy and quiet and “only speaks when she needs to”. The book’s prologue pretty much smacks you in the face with this information, and early scenes of the book (with the teacher and some classmates) do suggest this. Honestly, though, Ice seems to speak just as much as any other V.C. Andrews protagonist, so her whole character quirk gets thrown out the window.

Yes, she’s pretty. Yes, she’s talented, and thankfully her talent (singing, in this case) is woven through the narrative. It also evolves throughout the novel as it should, considering that this series is supposed to focus on girls with real creative talent and Cinnamon was just really good in an effin high school play and somehow made it into this very prestigious arts school. Ice, however, at least meets a dude who painstakingly helps her record a demo and she has some semblance of a musical background.

One pro about Ice is that people actually mention the weirdness of her name over and over and over, AS THEY SHOULD. Ice’s mother frequently brags or criticizes Ice for her name, which makes for a bit of an interesting character (though we’ll get to her later). At the very least, for a girl with a weird-ass name, she gets the right response.

A Tragic Death

Much like with Cinnamon, there are no deaths in this book, which leads me to wonder if all the books in the Shooting Stars series are this lame, if all the books in every V.C. Andrews mini-series are this lame, and if every V.C. Andrews series post-Landry (which was the most recent I read as a teen) is low on the death toll. Because if so, lame.

A Rags to Riches Plot

Surprisingly, the Goodman family (which start poor) does not go on to earn riches, though at one point the dad gets shot and, this being the United States, somehow manages?

A Vivid Gothic Setting

This entire novel takes place in an urban setting in Philadelphia. Ice’s dwelling is the Garden Apartments complex, which is pretty run-down and full of other low-income individuals. It’s all quite urban. No large mansion. No scenic grounds. Just a city, school, and an apartment that Ice’s horrendous mother wants to get out of.

A Beloved Doting Paternal Figure

We finally hit one V.C. Andrews staple with Ice’s father, Cameron. He’s a security guard who works late shifts and is way too easy-going. He forgives his wife for every vain aspect of her personality, BUT he does have a good relationship with Ice. They both have a love for jazz music, which is a stereotype, yes, unfortunatelyThankfully, Ice’s father doesn’t speak to Ice with all that hyper-saturated Daddy-like sweetness that other V.C. Andrews daddies do. He actually seems like a great well-to-do guy.

Even when Ice’s mother sets Ice up on a blind date with an older military man, Ice’s father actually trusts Ice’s judgement instead of going all shotgun dad about the situation.

OF COURSE, however, Ice still calls him “Daddy”.

A Hostile Maternal Figure (+ Bonus Mean Girl!)

Ice’s mother, Lena, isn’t exactly “hostile” in the way a normal V.C. Andrews maternal figure would be. She’s bossy and has to have her way, but she’s not overbearing. Literally all she cares about is vanity, looks, attracting the opposite sex. The first half of the book is cluttered with her ramblings, and I honestly think that Andrew Neiderman just watched a couple 90’s R&B videos and picked a backup dancer with the question, “What if she became a mom?” and that’s how Ice’s mother was created.

Ice’s mother is also a bit of a drunk and very irresponsible, the traits of which were actually represented well. Her main goal in this book is to get Ice laid, so she sets up her daughter with a friend’s son and gets her a makeover and a new outfit and forces her out into the world.

Some Good Olde School Misogyny

So let’s keep talking about Ice’s mother because she’s pretty much where all the misogyny in this book comes from. Considering this book takes place in the late90s/early ’00s (it was published in 2001), Ice’s mother def missed out on Destiny’s Child. Like, I’m pretty sure feminism was a little more evolved than this:

“Men tell you they don’t want other men gawking at you, but believe me, Ice, that’s exactly what they want. It’s like everything else they own. They want to drive a fancy car so everyone will look at them and be jealous. They want expensive watches and rings to draw green eyes. It’s the same with their women.”

And she’s not telling Ice this info in order to get her to fight the patriarchy. No, she’s making Ice up so she can live by these standards. Somebody get this woman some Beyonce. Forget “Lemonade”. Even Destiny’s Child-era Beyonce was better than this.

You too can be an independent woman, Ice’s mom!

Also, I can’t help but mention Andrew Neidermen’s double fucking standard when it comes to any gestures involving the chest area between males and females. We all know at this point just how obsessed he and plenty of other male authors specifically reference BREASTS.

In this passage, Ice mentions what the music she and Balwin share means to her:

“Balwin feels it like I do. When we’re doing a song together, we’re connected. We tough each other more deeply. In here,” I said with my hand over my breast, “and here,” I added, pointing to my temple.

And then I shit you not, FIVE PAGES LATER, Balwin does the same thing, but it’s referenced differently:

“The song was the only way I could tell you how I felt about you,” he said softly. “I feel it all here,” he added, placing his hand over his heart.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!





Incest!

None! Nada! I’m getting bored!

Some Really Bad Writing

Fortunately, Ice forces more on herself and her talent than she does in self-misery, so there isn’t the same breadth of melodrama spewing from her narrative. Her mental process is actually quite rational, albeit boring to read in a V.C. Andrews tale.

Here’s a passage where’s she’s talking about how her elective muteness benefits her IRL. This entire paragraph could have been like two sentences max, but hey, it’s V.C. Andrews:

I didn’t know any other person who paid as much attention to the symphony of the Garden Apartments as I did. They were too busy making their own noises to listen to anyone else’s and rarely did an hour pass in their homes when silence wasn’t broken. Silence, I learned early on, frightens people, or at least makes them feel very uncomfortable. The worst punishment imposed on my school friends seemed to be keeping them in detention, forcing them to be still and shutting them off from any communication. They squirmed, grimaced, put their head down and waited as if spiders had been released inside them and were crawling up and down their stomachs and under their chests.

The over-writing knows no bounds, like in this scene where Ice waits in the hospital for news about her recently-shot father:

The silences I did see and hear were the silence in the eys of the worried wives, mothers, husbands, brothers, sisters and friends who lingered in corridors, quietly comforting each other, holding each other, standing in the shadows and gazing absently at the floors or walls or looking out the windows at nothing, just waiting in a world where all the time seemed to have stopped, where everything said or done seemed so far off reverberating into the darkness.

At this point, Ice has already spoken plenty and her entire character quirk of not speaking has rather worn off.

Fantastic Psychological Horror

Things don’t exactly get good and messed up with the Goodman family, BUT there’s some pretty messed up stuff that happens after Ice starts hanging out with this dude, Balwin, who is a fellow music -lover and gifted piano player who befriends Ice and tries to records a demo with her in his fancy recording studio basement. Balwin’s a pretty great guy, but his father HATES the fact that he’s vaguely overweight, though the book and all its characters make it seem as though he’s ready for casting in My 600lb Life.

See, Balwin’s father is some rich pretentious dude who loathes that his son is overweight and eventually attempts to bribe Ice into getting Balwind to lose some weight. He even has a whole payment plan per pound system in the works. Ice, adamant that she doesn’t like Balwin in that way, refuses to participate, but because Balwin’s head over heels in love with Ice, he loses the weight so he can be with her. Of course, Ice eventually bangs up his fresh new bod, but then Balwin’s dad pays her upright in front of him, and then things break down in their relationship for like two pages before this entire elaborate body-shaming plot point resolves for nothing.

I mean, there’s def some psychological damage going on within Balwin’s family but ti’s not exactly for horror’s sake, but just to drive a very faint wedge between Ice and Balwin’s relationship.

My Final Rating

To be honest, there were some things that I appreciated about this one. I like that Ice has a bit of a head on her shoulders. Bad things keep happening to her but she doesn’t exactly have a “woe is me” kind of attitude and instead continues to go to Balwin’s house to record her demo. She has a few setbacks but Balwin and her father encourage her to fight for her passion. In the end, it actually is her passion instead of her beauty that helps her succeed.

So no, it wasn’t a “good” book but it was a decent twist on V.C. Andrews books, and I don’t feel that Ice’s race really was her character’s primary quirk. That said, I’d love to hear your perspective on this, so feel free to discuss in the comments.

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CINNAMON: A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review

Now, I know that I published my Dawn review last week. Normally I’d work through an entire series in order but I couldn’t get my hands on a copy of Secrets of the Morning right away. I did, however, find all four first books in the Shooting Stars mini-series. So let’s give the Cutler Series a bit of a break while we blast through Shooting Stars.

CINNAMON LOVES THE SHADOWS, BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE NO ONE CAN FIND HER…

For Cinnamon, dreaming of imaginary worlds and characters is her only escape from her mother’s breakdowns. Her grandmother’s overbearing control. Her family’s turmoil. But Cinnamon is discovering something special about herself, a gift from deep within that sets her apart: a talent for the theater that would finally give her a chance… to truly escape.

About the Book

Cinnamon is the first book in the Shooting Stars miniseries. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of the V.C. Andrews miniseries, as I’m sure most fans aren’t. The change from “family sagas” to serial novels happened when the rising prices of books resulted in the fall of paperback sales. Publishers to produce smaller novelettes sold at a lower cost, and thus, the string of V.C. Andrews mini-series collections occurred in the late ’90s to early ’00s. Check out this post, The Case of the Keyhole Covers, for more details on the change in V.C. Andrews’ brand. It’s a really interesting look at the unfortunate changes in the book market over the last couple of decades.

I was a teenager in the 2000’s, which was really when V.C. Andrews sales had already started slipping and the marketers tried to modernize the brand (starting with the Logan series in 1996). By the time I got into the books the “mini series” was an established thing, but I still found myself gravitating to the family sagas. I find it interesting how the V.C. Andrews brand has shifted with the market (“her” latest book is a friggin’ psychological thriller, like come on.)

It’s a bit of a testament to the how the “magic” of something only holds for so long. Like how those bands you loved in your teens meant so much to you the, but you listen to them now and you’re like, “WoW, sO eDgY.”

My Copy

I was super lucky that I found the entire Shooting Stars series at a local thrift shop. Honestly, I considered not even bothering with any of the miniseries collections but they were only a buck a book and the entire thrift store was 50% off that day, so I figured it was worth the pocket change.

Cinnamon is the most beat-up book in my collection. Creased spine. Creased cover. Wear on the outer edge. The spine binding is also crooked, so whoever owned this book before me was a real one-handed reader. Least there’s no cat piss, though!

The Review

I am not at all going into this with high expectations. I remember being very underwhelmed by the first book in the Broken Wings series, so let’s see how this minuscule format of V.C. Andrews literary genius works out.

An Innocent & Pretty, Yet Completely Naive Female Protagonist

Part of me wants to give Andrew Neiderman (Andrews’ ghostwriter) a little credit for trying to write an edgy goth-inspired teen girl character, but I just want do it because he did not pull things off well. When we first meet Cinnamon Carlson, she’s slamming the classroom door in a hall monitor’s face. (For one, why on God’s green earth is her name Cinnamon? Second, why does nobody make fun of her for that? Everybody was setting dumpster fires with Dawn’s name LINK TO REVIEW in my previous review, and Dawn is a perfectly normal name by all standards.)

Cinnamon’s voice is a refreshing change from other V.C. Andrews protagonists, but reading her narratives just feels wrong in this universe. Not only does she come off as petulant and bratty, but she also rambles to no end. At times she’ll branch off into a three-page flashback right in the middle of dialogue and it’s the most jarring thing to read. Nevertheless, she’s apparently supposed to be a great actress, even though her only acting experience is pretending to be a dead former resident of her old gothic house while she bones her boyfriend the first time.

I like that Cinnamon is the sort of girl who initiates sex, but that also docks points from the “V.C. Andrews protagonist” standard of being a prude and knowing nothing about what “intimate relations” are. This chick is like the Sue Johanson of V.C. Andrews characters.

A Tragic Death

At the beginning of this book, Cinnamon’s mother is taken to the hospital with some sort of psychosis where she believes she’s still pregnant with the infant she recently miscarried. Cinnamon and her grandmother have the mother admitted to the hospital and the mother spends half her time there. I was so waiting for the mother to end up taking her own life or something, but she does end up making a full recovery and returns home.

This book has zero deaths, which is shocking on its own.

A Rags to Riches Plot

Tere’s nothing of the sort here. Cinnamon’s dad s a stockbroker and makes enough money to not only support a wife and a child but to also own a fancy house that also holds his overbearing mother.

A Vivid Gothic Setting

I quite liked this one, though I hated that we didn’t get to spend much time there. Cinnamon does describe the house quite vividly, a Second Empire with a mansard roof and a pretty killer attic full of stuff dating back to the 1800s. Cinnamon frequently describes past happens of her and her mother holding seances in the attic to talk to the old family that used to live in the house.

While cool, the house doesn’t really hold that much weight in the story. It’s pretty much just a plot device that allows the overbearing grandmother character to clean.

A Beloved Doting Paternal Figure

Cinnamon’s father is a stockbroker who spends most of his time in New York. She does call him “Daddy” but he’s more of an “always at work” kind of father figure than anything else. Even after Cinnamon’s mom ends up hospitalized, the dad never comes around, so Cinnamon and her boyfriend skip school to drive to New York to spy on him. They end up finding Cinnamon’s dad kissing another woman, and it’s a stupid plot gimmick that drives a wedge between them.

In the book’s “climax”, Cinnamon’s dad ends up having some kind of bodily attack but it doesn’t end up killing him (he just needs a pacemaker!). He spends the last few pages of the book explaining that he was only kissing the woman in New York because he gambled a widowed client’s investment money on a stock that didn’t turn out and the widow decided to blackmail him into pretending they were in a relationship. In the end, Cinnamon forgives him and yet another rich-ass privileged white guy gets away with being a piece of shit.

A Hostile Maternal Figure (+ Bonus Mean Girl!)

Grandmother Beverly is our hostile Material Figure and boy oh boy is she pointless. All she does is linger around in the house after the mother’s hospitalization, taking down all the cool stuff and Baby Boomer-ing it up with beige and bland floral wall art. She does, however, Konmari the kitchen up something FIERCE.

At one point she puts a lock on Cinnamon’s bedroom door to prevent Cinnamon from storming off and hiding out. Cinnamon just ends up in the attic instead, which is where she’s caught having sex with her pointless boyfriend who serves no purpose at all but to feed off Cinnamon’s amazing acting (er, roleplaying) skillz.

Some Good Olde School Misogyny

Oddly enough, there really isn’t any old-school misogyny in this novel. Unlike most V.C. Andrews books, this one is set in a more modern time, so I’m not sure if the lack of importance to beauty standards is intentional or not. There are a few portions where the Grandmother reams Cinnamon out for not realizing what “traditional” marriage looks like, but meh.

Incest!

None! Just one really lame sex scene before the totally 100% not-blood-related boyfriend is sent off to a juvenile detention place and is never heard from again.

Some Really Bad Writing

Cinnamon has few real gems of bad prose, but I managed to dig up a few cringe-worthy passages for you. Here’s a scene between Cinnamon and her grandmother, where granny’s reaming her out for being unappreciative of her father. It’s the closest we get to a legit V.C. Andrews explosion:

“Mothers and daugthers have to realize that husbands and fathers can’t be at their beck and call every minute. They’re out there in the hard, cold world trying to make a living, trying to earn enough to provide and keep you comfortable. Who do you think pays the mortgage on this ridiculous relic of a house, and who pays for the food you eat and the gas you waste driving around in that car of yours, and who gave you that car and who–“

“And who cares?” I shouted, covering my ears with my hands. “Take it all back, everything!”

I turned and fled from her.

Here’s the (one and only!) scene where Cinnamon puts her acting talents to true test, pitting herself against the mean girl Iris (who only appears a couple of times to create tension) with some hot drama dude, Dell. Andrew Neiderman (V.C. Andrews’ ghostwriter) also gets a chance to once again prove he’s a male writer painfully trying to write a female character:

He looked at me and smiled as if my daring to challenge Iris was a childish act of bravado. It stirred heat under my breasts. I straightened my shoulders and closed my eyes for a moment, conjuring up the very scene Miss Hamilton had chosen to be read.

And then I began, reciting, illustrating I had memorized the lines as well. I could hear a very audible gasp of surprise and a stirring in the group. Dell, who I knew had intended just to read his lines without much feeling, suddenly found himself actually acting. Later, Miss Hamilton would tell me when someone is good, very good, it makes everyone else reach for his highest capability.

Even Barry would be impressed, underboob sweat and all!

One plot point in the novel’s lacklustre climax is when Iris spreads some rumours around school about Cinnamon and her teacher, Miss Hamilton, kissing (it was for acting!, though I’m sure a modern school district would still take issue with such a thing). It’s supposed to be Gossip Girl levels of shocking, but really just amounts to Cinnamon rambling about the woe of her life:

…girls like Iris Ainsley kept swarming back like angry bees around me. She was so beautiful and intelligent. She had more than most girls dream of having, but her jealously was too strong. It replaced the soft blue in her eyes with a putrid green and those perfect lips into writhing corkscrews, turning and twisting words and thoughts until they spilled out around me in the form of accusations about Miss Hamilton and myself.

The clouds steamed in from the north, cold and dark, eager to close off my sunshine.

It’s so gloriously horrible, yet without any character development, even the melodrama fails to achieve true V.C. Andrews status. Whenever I’d read these sort of passages I’d just wanna scream, “WHATEVER, CINNAMON, STOP COMPLAINING.” At least Dawn had some legit things to cry about in her book.

Fantastic Psychological Horror

This book really lacked in a lot of the elements that I (and many other readers!) find appealing about V.C. Andrews books. I’d honestly fault the “edgy” voice of the protagonist for this, but the plot was also lacking. Nothing of major consequence occurs. Nothing changes. By the end of the book, all is reset save for Cinnamon magically acing her audition to the exclusive Senetsky School of Performing Arts.

Long story short, while the plot with the mother started moving the story along, the interweaving “traumas’ that came Cinnamon’s way proved ineffectual at pivoting any change in her character and there was no horror to be found in this book, which is kind of funny because Cinnamon’s supposed to be GOTH AF.

My Final Rating

I did not have high hopes for this book (or series). The “mini-series” format started sometime in the late ’90s, which was where a decline in V.C. Andrews sales started to occur. For old-school fans, they just didn’t hold up and I completely see why. That being said, these novels are kind of fun to read for comparison’s sake.

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DAWN: A Grown-Ass V.C. Andrews Review

A few weeks back I spent the day with the kids at my mom’s place for some nostalgia. We did some thrift store shopping just I did so frequently in my teens. This was the only V.C. Andrews book in the entire store, thankfully the first in a series, so I bought it and dug right in for my late summer reading. This adventure led me to start my new “Grown Ass V.C. Andrews Review” series. So let’s just start things off with a bang.

IN HER FINE NEW VIRGINIA SCHOOL, DAWN LONGCHAMP FEELS HAPPY AND SAFE, BUT NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS…

Now Dawn and her older brother Jimmy have a chance for a decent, respectable life, and Dawn’s secret precious hope to study singing can come true. Philip Cutler, the handsomest boy in school, sets Dawn’s heart on fire. She is deeply devoted to her brooding brother, but with Philip, she imagines a lovely dream of romance…

Then Dawn’s mother suddenly dies, and her entire world begins to crumble. After a terrible new shock, she is thrust into a different family and an evil web of unspoke sins. Her sweet innocence lost, humiliated and scorned, Dawn is desperate to find Jimmy again… and strip away the wicked lies that will change all their lives forever!

About the Book

Dawn is the first book in the Cutler series (the first series fully-penned by V.C. Andrews’ posthumous ghostwriter, Andrew Neiderman). It’s considered an early favourite of all the family sagas penned (or rather, inspired) by Andrews. Fun Fact: Dawn was also the first V.C. Andrews novel to feature an opening letter from the Andrews family, formally stating that all subsequent novels were ghostwritten, inspired by Virginia’s “storytelling genius”.

My Copy

Right out the gate, I’m super bummed that my copy is a later printing, which doesn’t include the classic V.C Andrews keyhole cover, which is a signature part of the V.C. Andrews brand. There’s a picture of the title character and that’s it! No stepback page with the full family photo. No pretty foil details. Thumbs down. If I can find a proper keyhole version of this book in future I’ll probably replace this one, but we’ll see.

The book itself is in decent shape. Some creases on the cover and some along the spine (WHY CAN’T YOU READ A BOOK WITHOUT CREASING THE SPINE, PAST READER(S)!). There are some stains on the bottom of the pages that leak down through the entire book. When you flip the pages, the bottom corner with the stains gives off a vague smell of cat piss. Fantastic.

I add these details because I think they’re important to used mass-market paperbacks. I used to hate them because they always came in such rough condition, but reading this one made me appreciate the “well-loved and well-read” aspect to them. That said, I like the idea of an individual book having its own little “history” if you will.

Except this book was obviously in a box full of books in a basement where a cat peed. Maybe more than once.

The Review

Seeing as this was one of the early books penned by the V.C. Andrews ghostwriter after her death, Dawn does fit in with the classic V.C. Andrews formula. How well, you ask? Let’s dig in!

Innocent & Pretty, Yet Completely Naive Female Protagonist

Meet Dawn Longchamp. She’s a 14-year-old poor blonde girl with a father, mother and an older brother, Jimmy. Dawn doesn’t know a lot. She’s lonely because the family moves around often, on a count of Dawn’s father losing his job frequently, and the family having to move to a new and destitute location. She shares a pull-out sofa with her brother and doesn’t know anything about sex. She likes to sing sometimes, though. And oh, such pretty blonde hair, unlike the rest of the family, whom all have dark brown hair.

On the scale of Iccocent and Pretty and Completely Naive, Dawn fits the book pretty well. She even catches her brother watching her get dressed on multiple occasions and doesn’t really think it odd.

Dawn also cries on NUMEROUS occasions. Be it when her mom dies or when the girls at school are mean to her or when her virtually in every single paragraph of the second half of the book, she’s down on her face, sobbing in tears until she can’t cry anymore. And yet, the next paragraph comes and the tears just keep on coming…

A Tragic Death

After giving birth, Dawn’s mother slowly (and stubbornly) dies of tuberculosis. While the mother’s in hospital, a security guard actually recognizes Dawn’s father. It’s not until after the family returns home sans Mommy that the police come and arrest Dawn’s dad for being a KIDNAPPER. Who did he kidnap? Why, little blonde-haired Dawn, of course!

Rags to Riches Plot

The Longchamps were poor losers, but it turns out that Dawn is actually a well-to-do Cutler (of Cutler Cove Hotel fame!), kidnapped shortly after birth by two lowly hotel workers who disappeared into the night. After some insistence, the police (disregarding proper protocol and without providing any mental counselling–like if you hate cops this might just be the book for you, because they’re like real-life bad in this), lock up Dawn’s dad, send Jimmy and Dawn’s baby sister, Fern, into the foster system, and cart Dawn off to her true family abode, the Cutler Cove Hotel.

Vivid Gothic Setting

So the police drive Dawn to the hotel. The sandy beach can be seen in the distance, but the major part of every V.C Andrews setting is always the house. This one’s described as “an enormous three-story Wedgewoods mansion with milk-white shutters and a large wraparound porch”. There’s a spiral staircase, polished stone foundations, beautiful fountains, well-lit walkways and gazebos adorning the hotel grounds. And then the police pull around the back of the hotel. Dawn is taken in to meet her grandmother in a lavish back office and then is taken to some grubby plain maid’s room.

The maid’s room is where much of the book’s second-half occurs. I didn’t really feel much of the hotel. At a couple of points, we get to check out Dawn’s birth-mother’s suite, which sounds like the ideal place for one to grossly exaggerate one’s mental breakdowns in full-face makeup, but hey, that’s just my opinion.

Overall the setting is good, but for a V.C. Andrews setting I felt the resort left much to be desired.

Beloved Doting Paternal Figure

One particular facet of all V.C. Andrews books are childish usage of parental references. Fathers are pretty much always DADDY, and in Dawn, we’re blessed with not one, but two dads!

In this case, “Daddy” is Dawn’s kidnapper father, who isn’t so much doting as he is a drunkard who can’t keep a job. He’s introduced in the first chapter as dark and menacing, but as the opening of the novel unfolds, he seems like a decent dude. He does all the stuff dads are supposed to do and doesn’t come off as creepy like most V.C. Andrews dads do.

Dawn’s biological father is pretty much just an errand-boy for grandmother Cutler. Dawn calls him “Father” and while he’s nice and accommodating, he’s definitely got some Sterling Archer-like vibes to his mother. So definitely not the standard daddy-daughter love fest that I’m accustomed to.

Hostile Maternal Figure (+ Bonus Mean Girl!)

Okay, so we’ve got grandmother Cutler, who doesn’t even get a name as the matronly evil woman. To start, she makes Dawn work as a chambermaid in the hotel to “train” her to be a proper “wealthy” person. She insists that Dawn be called her birth-name, “Eugenia”, and at one point tries to get her to wear a Eugenia nametag. When Dawn refuses, Grandmother Cutler locks Dawn in her room for a night until Dawn cries enough tears to woe to make one of the men in the family unlock the door for her.

Clara Sue is our Bonus Mean Girl!. She starts out being the girl at the private school. There’s some general mean girl antics, but once it’s revealed that Clara Sue is actually Dawn’s younger sister, the fake friendship is off. Clara Sue, however, has quite the sweet tooth and is often seen eating chocolates and shit. At one point, Dawn even gets to wear all of the clothes that don’t fit Clara Sue, and that’s pretty much the extent of her character, is that she’s fat and Dawn isn’t. *deep sigh*

I actually liked Dawn’s birth-mother, Laura Sue the best because she was just plain old soap opera crazy. She just sat in her opulent suite eating breakfast in fancy robes and pearls and diamond rings and shit. AND full-face makeup. EVERYTHING was too much for her. Like she finds out her daughter grew up poor and she’s like, OH THEY WERE SO POOR, THE TRAGEDY!, and she has to take a whole week of solace in her room to get over the basic idea of it all. It does not get more V.C. Andrews than this.

Some Good Olde School Misogyny

There’s not a lot here, honestly. Most V.C. Andrews books lean heavily on girls/women being beautiful and innocent and doing their best not to lead men on. There’s a bit of that, mainly from the grandmother character. Even the parts where Philip just can’t get enough of his sister are conveyed more as him being the weirdo than Dawn being a filthy whore.

“Is something wrong? Oh, please, don’t tell me something’s wrong,” she pleaded, dropping her fork and pressing her palms to her bosom.

Like, for real, what the fuck is that? Numerous female characters pull off this maneuver to express shock in this book. It’s like the Home Alone face but you bring your hands over your tits like a hand bra? Please tell me, Andrew Neiderman. How do women work?

This, but with boobs.





Incest!

Okay, so this book is full of intriguing incest. As I’ve already mentioned, Dawn and her brother Jimmy sleep on the same pull-out sofa, which leads to some general awkwardness seeing that they’re both in some primetime adolescence. At first, Dawn has no attraction to Jimmy. She just loves him like a brother.

THEN, once the kids get free admission to the private school that Dawn’s father works as a janitor at, Dawn meets Philip Cutler, a dashing popular boy who likes to lead girls on so he can take them out to his private make-out spot so they can do more than just make out. Dawn stupidly falls under his spell, as Philip is your classic roll-your-eyes-over with hardcore romantic sap playa. Philip gets as far as second base with Dawn before his friends barge in on the lovin’.

THEN, of course, the twist takes place. Dawn’s sickened by the thought of falling for her brother. Philip, however, just can’t get over how beautiful she is and goes all Jaime Lannister for Dawn, right down to a pretty standard rape scene that’s kind of just thrown in near the end there for no reason. Just to give Dawn a bit more trauma, right?

Jimmy, not actually Dawn’s bro, becomes Dawn’s new love interest (for some reason after showing up at the beach resort). They end up nearly boning at one point, but then, of course, Clara Sue breaks up their no-so-sibling celebration, dammit.

Some Real Bad Writing

Here’s a horrifying one when Philip and Dawn are getting hot and heavy. It takes place in a scene that reads as erotic, but then this line comes up, which can’t at all read as enticing to arachnophobes:

The tips of his fingers surrounded a button of my blouse. I felt it open and then felt his fingers against my skin, moving like a thick spider in and under my bra.

Here’s pretty redundant one where Dawn gets ambushed by Clara Sue and some mean girls who spray her with a stink bomb right before her big solo recital:

I cried until I had no more tears and my head and throat ached. I felt as if a heavy blanket of defeat had been thrown over me. It weighed far too much for me to simply throw it off. My shoulders shook with my sobs.

Here’s one where Dawn’s standing in the rain, rationalizing that she can’t bone Philip now because he’s her bro:

Good-bye to my first and what I would be my most romantic love, I thought. Good-bye to being swept off my feet and floting alongsude warm, soft white clouds. Our passionate kisses shattered and fell with the raindrops, and no one could tell which were my tears and which were the drops of rain.

And one last bit of melodrama, when Dawn talks herself into boning Jimmy, the boy who’s she’s known all her life to be her brother wasn’t actually her brother:

When we kissed, my body softened, and I thought how right it would be for Jimmy to be the one to have taken me from girlhood innocence into a woman’s world. I had always felt safe with him, no matter where we went or what we did, because I sensed how important it was for him that I be happy and secure. Tragedy and hardship had tied us together as brother and sister, and now it seemed only right, even our destiny, that romantic love bind us together.

That’s the melodrama that only a man pretending to write as a woman could write.

“Jimmy wanted to protect Dawn more than any of the other dudes, so clearly he’s the alpha she wants to bone, right?”





Fantastic Psychological Horror

So this is what I read V.C. Andrews for is that weird feeling of alienation and frustration and isolation. I love that the characters feel like cardboard soap opera cutouts. I like that they’re so intent to stay within their stereotypes that they never evolve or empathize with the protagonist’s trials. It’s an absolutely frustrating experience. As a reader, I can’t help but feel trapped in this alternate reality where nothing goes right and the B-characters never feel like real people.

Granted, I don’t think this “effect” was intentional on Andrews’ part, but every character interaction can feel so frustrating. I’m made to feel like a little girl who’s just trying to be good an impress people and no attempt I make at being “proper” ever succeeds. I’m trapped in this horrible place with horrible people and I really think that element of storytelling is what makes V.C. Andrews’ books so gripping.

My Final Rating

Okay, so formula aside, what do I really think about this book? Of course, it’s trashy literature. It’s not good. While the setting alone doesn’t live up to “V.C. Andrews” standards, it does hold well up to regular reading standards. (Then again, most of the books I prefer to read take place in modern-day city settings, so I find setting to really be the one element that I hold dear to V.C. Andrews books). NEVERTHELESS, here are my personal ratings matched up to the V.C. Andrews Vibes, which brings us to my final Grown-Ass Woman Verdict of Dawn:

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