Chris and Cathy come from a long line of poor decision makers, and they continue that tradition when they return to the new Foxworth Hall to celebrate Bart's graduation from Harvard and his twenty-fifth birthday. What they think is a one night stay before moving to Hawaii turns into a three year long run in hell.
Cathy and Chris are still the same bores they always were. Jory (ugh, that name) is still mister perfect. Bart is still an oozing walking herp sore that's consistently on its period. Cindy turned into quite the little slut.
The newest addition to the family is Uncle Joel, one of Corrine's brothers thought to be long dead. He's old, he's creepy, he's been living in an Italian monastery so he's developed some hardcore religious beliefs and he's Bart's mentor. Nice.
A bunch of bad things happen such as:
Jory becomes paralyzed and then his pregnant wife cheats on him with Bart then leaves him after giving birth. Cindy is a slut who keeps getting caught having sex. Cathy constantly whines to Chris and Chris gets pissy with her about it. Bart has wild mood swings and Uncle Joel is just evil. How evil? Well, we never get to know for certain because Andrews leads us down a poorly plotted path then says "awww fuck it" and takes the easy way out. Characters personalities instantly change and petty nuisances are conveniently taken care of as though as they never existed.
How I wish I would have saved my time and just used Wikipedia to satisfy my curiosity.
Here we go again, picking up seven years later with the two remaining Dresden Dolls and Cathy's spawn.
This time around Cathy is not our narrator, thank you Jaysus! Honestly, I cannot stand Cathy, she’s just all around terrible and any goodwill or sympathy she gained in Flowers in the Attic was shredded by Petals on the Wind. This story is her sons Jory (I can’t with that name) and Bart’s to tell.
Jory (ugh, that name) and Bart (another ugh) are polar opposites. Bart is jealous of Jory and feels that everyone hates him and loves Jory. As the kids tell it Cathy and stepfather Chris sure are touchy feely, they dance in the living room, sneak off to their bedroom a lot, lock eyes and give each other long and meaningful looks and glow whenever they are together. Cathy has finally submitted to the lustful sin that was forged in the dust and gloom of the attic years ago and seems to be making up for lost time. Excuse me while I vomit.
Their little slice of heaven turns into a big heaping pile of hell when a mysterious woman in black (not really) moves into the empty mansion next door and starts paying attention to lonely little Bart. She feeds him junk food, tells him that she’s his grandma and loves him and buys him whatever he wants, except a pony, while the evil butler John Amos starts to warp his mind with religion and hate. Oh James Evan Sr., how could you? I know you’re still struggling to get your family out of the projects but did you have to resort to this?
Chris and Cathy’s secret gets spilled to the boys, a bunch of bad stuff happens, Cathy and Corrine get kidnapped. People die, scores have been settled blah blah blah.
If There be Thorns is an addictive stupid read but it has an outrageous plot hole. A plot hole that’s just too big to ignore. Cathy’s former mother in law Madame M. seems to believe that Paul is still alive. I thought they lived in the same town? Wouldn’t she have known that he died years ago? And wouldn’t have the kids been calling Chris dad in front of her during their yearly visits to the graves and crazy Corrine?
Cathy is still awful, Chris is still a pathetic mangina, Jory is an obnoxious goody goody, Bart is crazy and Corrine is just a third tier character that you don’t really care about.
While this book is much better than Petals it’s still not as good as Flowers. You can tell Andrews started off trying but after awhile she gives up and rushes everything just to get to the end. And that rushed feeling just gives this story an oddness about it that I can’t quite explain. Thankfully unlike Petals, that oddness wasn’t as overwhelming.
Petals on the Wind is terrible, and I mean just out and out terrible. How terrible you might ask? Petals on the Wind is a slap dash put together hot mess with no real thought or effort put into it. It struck me as quite odd in the plotting and dialogue.
We meet up once again with the Dresden Dolls right where we left them, heading south. Lil' sis Carrie gets sick on the bus and the other passengers are pissed at the kids because of the stink her vomit is producing. Never fear though, a nice older black lady takes sympathy on them and takes them home to her "doctor son" who helps the children and because they are just so damn charming (more like the moment he lays eyes on a 15 yr old Cathy he wants to hit that thing) he legally takes full custody of all 3 Dolls. He saves Carrie's life, mentors Chris on his way to doctordom, buys Cathy slutty see through nighties which she gladly parades around the house in now that Chris is in college and Carrie is in a boarding school.
Despite 3 years 4 months and 16 days locked in a room and forced to play in the attic Chris is ready for college and ready for med school. Despite the interruption in her studies, Cathy is a self taught ballerina and good enough for an international stage. Carrie is still the same obnoxious whiney unlikeable brat who's stunted growth is a constant source of torment. Now that Cathy is a woman every man she sees instantly falls in love her and wants her.
She devises a master plan of revenge, a very stupid master plan, against her mother and grandmother. Since Cathy is probably one of the most stupid female characters in history, she decides that becoming a rich and famous prima ballerina is the best revenge, how that's revenge I don't know, seems more like moving along with her life and pursuing her dreams. So after things don't work out the way she had hoped and her career as a dancer is finished she has a newer even more stupid plan. This brilliant plan is to sleep with her stepfather and have his baby and make him divorce her mother.
This story is beyond stupid. If it weren't for one outrageously stupid plot point I would be done with this series. Cathy has a 7 yr old son by her first husband, her second husband is dying and pleads with her to engage in the incestuous relationship that Chris has been begging her for for years so her two sons will have a father, gross I know, he reasons that the 7 year old will forget that his true relation to Chris is as his nephew and not his son. Um.... 7 years old is pretty damn old to forget something like that. So ewwww.
Andrews uses the words sensational and sensuous so much that they loose all meaning. Her characters are one dimensional and too cardboard to care about and too stupid to be believed. So why am I going to read the next book in this series of fuckery? Damned if I know, but I will.
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!
Sometimes my desire to read trash is so strong it leads me down a path that is either good, bad or just plain awful. More often than not that path ends in bad and at times just plain awful. I have no clue as to what on earth possessed me to read Endless Love. One moment I'm reading a good book and then suddenly I think to myself "Hey, why not read Endless Love? It's been on your list of books to read since forever." I should have heeded the warning sign that this book was going to be a puddle of sticky dog doo after reading a piece on how Scott Spencer feels his novel is beyond reproach and that both film adaptations were pieces of trash that missed the point. Please, bitch, please. Mr. Spencer needs to have several seats because his novel is nothing more than a self indulgent love letter to the art of stalking and to its practitioners. Our stalker, David, tells us his tale of woe, of how he was brought into the bosom of the Butterfield family then so coldly discarded, actually he was sent to banned camp for thirty days, but I guess thirty days in the life of a horny teenaged boy is a lifetime. David loves the Butterfields, he loves mama Butterfield, poppa Butterfield, older brother Butterfield and little brother Butterfield, but mainly he loves Jade Butterfield. He loves Jade Butterfield with a fiery passion, a passion so strong the two teens create their own little world and have marathon sex sessions, David can stay hard for hours on end as he tells it. Because of these every night all night long sex sessions, delicate snowflake Jade isn't getting enough sleep. Poppa Butterfield tells David to get lost for at least thirty days, well David thinks so much with his penis he gets the brilliant idea to start a fire so the family will have to leave the house and then be forced to talk to him. Too bad he choses the very night the Butterfield family decided to trip balls together. The Butterfield parents are very permissive open minded parents of the late sixties, they allow their daughter to have sex in the house with her nearly live in boyfriend, they smoke marijuana and drop acid together all the while taking in a collection of freaks and granola munchers to gawk at and possibly learn from, or something "progressive" and "enlightened" like that. Like the whinging self involved moron that he is, David readily confesses to his crime in a bid for redemption. Instead of redemption, he gets institutionalized. Thus begins his incessant crying and moaning and ruminating thoughts about the Butterfields, Jade, his sex life with Jade and his need to belong to the Butterfield family. Poor David never knew that a family could be so close and loving because his parents, mainly his mother, are self possessed cold ex communists. They may have quit the party, but the party never quit them. Upon his release from the hospital David only has one thought and that's to find his letters to and from Jade. Day and night and night day this all he thinks about. When he finally gets a job enrolls in college and gets his own apartment he then only thinks about finding the Butterfield family. He searches in every phonebook in the country for Butterfields until he finds one then he skips parole to visit mama Butterfield. Mama Butterfield has divorced poppa Butterfield and embraced her inner cougar. She tells David that everyone in the family thinks that they were lovers so why not prove them all right? Of course he rejects her advances because he's saving himself for Jade. During his stay in mama Butterfield's city, poppa Butterfield sees David crossing the street, this makes poppa run after him causing him to be hit by a car. Somehow this is David's fault, I don't know how that is, but later in the story the blame is put squarely on his shoulders even though poppa Butterfield was crossing against traffic in order to get his hands onto David. What follows is a reunion with the Butterfields to mourn their fallen patriarch, David finally meets up with Jade and then a long very detailed blood drenched fuck fest takes place. Reunited and it feels so good then secrets are revealed and then it all falls apart then an arrest is made and then punishment resumes. After years of sexual fidelity David decides that sexual healing is what he needs after learning that Jade has married some French guy. This story is not romantic, it's creepy and gross. David is a creep, the Butterfield parents are just awful. What kind of parents let their children drop acid with them and let their underage daughter have sex with her underage boyfriend in their home? I don't care if this took place in the late sixties, bad parenting is bad parenting. David alludes to some kind of inappropriate incesty type relationship between Jade and her older brother Keith, their mother Anne alludes to the fact that her husband Hugh may have had some incestuous feelings for Jade and Anne admits she could only get off with her husband after watching Jade and David have sex. The characters are just flat out unlikeable. Anne is some kind of pompous cougar who harbors a desire for David and writes long winded wordy to the point that they make no sense letters, Jade is a slutty harpy faux lesbian tease and David is just all sorts of awful and creepy. And clocking in at over four hundred pages, it truly feels endless. But you don't feel endless love for this story or it's characters, you feel endless annoyance and a wish that they all died in the fire at the beginning.
