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!
