The Kids Ain't Right

Thanks to Lifetime I finally got around to reading this piece of trash. I guess Lifetime promised a more faithful adaptation than the 1987 film starring Kristy Swanson, since I never watched the 1987 version I don't know how much it deviates from the novel. What I got out of the Lifetime movie was Heather Graham prancing around in a series of candy colored Stepford Wives outfits and one truly hideous gold lame dress that looks like a reject from a Golden Girls dress rehearsal while Ellen Burstyn delivered baskets of food and delivered stale lines about sin and God's ever watchful eye, so of course I had to satisfy my own curiosity. My local childhood drug store sold what seemed like a thousand different VC Andrews novels all with creepy covers of red eyed albino children or teens bathed in a sinister green glow. My eight year old self was fascinated and creeped out by them, I also knew there was something "wrong" about these books from the older girls who read them and whispered about them to one another. Hey, I was a young Catholic school girl. I'm surprised it took me so damn long to read this hot mess.

Right out of the gate Flowers in the Attic drips with a creepy incestuous vibe. Our narrator Cathy is seemingly in love with her perfect father, he's both perfect physically and personality wise, but then again the entire family is perfect. Her mother is the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen, Cathy, her brothers Christopher, Cory and her sister Carrie are so beautiful and fragile looking that friends of the family call them the Dresden dolls, sadly not named after the band but named after those creepy porcelain dolls. Her parents are so much in love that when they're near one another they can't stop touching each other and declaring their perfect true love for each other.

Cathy's world comes to a screeching halt when her perfect father dies in a fiery car crash, as we learn in the most hilarious police notification ever. Don't worry though, Cathy's father is so perfect the crash wasn't his fault. Since their momma is such the beauty and not meant for work she begs for mercy from her beyond wealthy parents since she's too lazy to learn how to support herself and her children. The following three years are a living hell for Cathy and her siblings, they are locked in a room, forced to play in an attic, learn their parents are actually half uncle and half niece, are tormented and nearly starved to death by their cruel and crazy grandmother, their mother joins team #getmoneybitch and decides to slowly poison her four "darlings" since having children forfeits any claim to her father's endless wealth.

Cathy has to endure hair tarring, being raped by her older brother, becoming a mother to her two younger siblings who never emotionally mature. Seriously the twins were so damn annoying that I was rooting for both of them to die. The most disturbing element to this story is that every man in her family looks alike. Her brother looks like her father, her father looks like her grandfather. Mother fawns all over the looks like dead husband son and ignores the other children which calls into question her relationship with her father, we learn that Cathy's grandfather never wanted her mother to marry anyone. One has to wonder why this is.......

Now I have the sickening need to read the rest of the books in this series, so damn you Lifetime!