About this title: The four beautiful Dollanganger children are locked in a mansion attic to keep them hidden from their fundamentalist grandfather, who would disinherit their mother if he learns of their existence. The mother, who cares more for money than her children, soon grows murderous.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Pocket Books
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780671640453ISBN:0671640453
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Dollanger Saga (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Pocket Books
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780671640453ISBN:0671640453
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Dollanger Saga (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Pocket Books
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780671640453ISBN:0671640453
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Dollanger Saga (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Pocket Books
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780671640453ISBN:0671640453
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Highlighting/underlining. BEEN READ A COUPLE OF TIMES. HAS A NAME ON FIRST PAGE AND HIGHLIGHTING ON INSIDE COVER. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Dollanger Saga (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Pocket Books
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780671640453ISBN:0671640453
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Acceptable condition paperback. Minor to moderate wear along cover edges, corners, and spine, small creases at cover corners, nickel sized scuff on front cover, pages lightly tanned, otherwise, a tight, reading copy. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Pocket Books
Date Published: 1980
ISBN-13:9780671411534ISBN:0671411535
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
"The inspiration for reading this book came from David's stellar review from a few weeks ago. I know my own review of this book will not in any way compare.
Being of middle school age in the late 1980's it seemed like the reading type girls either read V.C. Andrews or Sweet Valley High, or maybe they were reading SVH in like sixth and seventh grade and they started on V.C. Andrews in eighth grade. I don't really remember, but I do remember seeing books from these two series in the hands of lots of girls. I didn't dare speak to them so I don't know what they thought of either series. V.C. Andrews at the time sort of appealed to me only because I was on a steady diet of Stephen King books and for some inexplicable reason the V.C. Andrews books were shelved in the same Horror sections at the book stores. I figured there must be something cool about them, like horror for girls or something, but I didn't pay too much attention to them. How little did I know about the books? Well I might have heard they were about incest, but it wasn't until reading David's review that the incest thing actually struck me.
After reading Flowers in the Attic I'm confused about why this would be placed in the horror section. There is little that would classify this book as horror. Incest might be horrific and the treatment of the children in the book is certainly cruel and unusual but there isn't much horror or even real terror going on in the book. Maybe because the horror is only beginning in this book (as it says on the inside front cover in the few word description for each of the novels in the series) the real horror will pop up in books 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Will I read those to find out if the horror really gets going? I don't know. Part of me says no. I have delved into the psyche of teen girls enough for now, and instead I'll return to reading depressing post-war German authors. Another part of me says of course I'll read at least the next one. Most books in a series end in someway that make you want to read on to find out the answers to questions left unanswered, or from some kind of cliffhanger like quality. Not this one though. For me I can't see where the story is going to go next. I don't believe that there is enough fodder or momentum to sustain another book, nevermind another four books. My only guess is that the hapless children will get themselves locked up once again somewhere and some more incest will happen. Or something like that.
The content of this book was sort of disappointing. From the comments people made about the book I was expecting it to be dirtier, instead it turned out pretty tame with more stolen glances and shy looks then actual good ol' Southern incest. On the plus side after a painful first chapter loaded down with pedantic dialog the book became pretty readable and dare I say enjoyable once it got going."
"The four Dollanganger children have perfect suburban lives—until their father is killed in a car accident and, unable to support her children alone, their mother returns to her abusive parents. Their grandmother orders the children kept secret, locked away in a single abandoned room with access to the attic. As their seclusion builds from day into years, the older children must become parents for their younger siblings even while they go through their own turbulent, unaided adolescence themselves. This contrived isolation also leads the older siblings into incest, and for both the isolation and incest Flowers in the Attic is something of a guilty pleasure: a fairy-tale world of children without parents, fending for themselves and falling innocently into society's sins. However, the writing style, concept, and plot are so painfully unskilled, predictable, and clichéd that they suck even the guiltiest pleasure out of the book and, instead, render it just plain bad. The concept is intriguing, but the book itself is a waste of time, and I don't recommend it.
So many of the concepts of this book are secretly intriguing: the sequestered isolation of the children, haunted by the presence of their forbidding grandmother, creates a fairy-tale world where children take the place of adults and build their own rule and structure; the slowly developing romance between the older siblings Chris and Cathy, who have no one else to turn to for support or for love, is forbidden and at the same time genuinely sympathetic. As such there is the barest bit of pleasure in the concepts of the book, and in reading to the next page, the next chapter, to see how the story unfolds and how the characters come together. For these reasons, a number of reviews call Flowers in the Attic a guilty pleasure.
I would take no issue with the book if it were a titillating novel with no redeemable value, just as long as the book were still fun to read. However, Flowers in the Attic is far from enjoyable to read—instead, Andrews's writing style and storytelling verge on painfully bad. Cathy, second child and oldest sister, is the narrator; although intended to be an adult reflecting back on her early adolescence, the narrative voice sounds like a child. She approaches her story with wide-eyed exclamation points and italics, repeated obvious facts, and exclamations like "golly gee!", and this immature narration becomes quite annoying—and strips the character of the premature aging that she is supposed to undergo. Preceded by blatant foreshadowing, most pieces of the plot are visible from a long way off. Rather than creating a tense journey to their revelation, the book's "dark secrets" become laughably predictable. Combined with simplistic clichés such as an entire family with great beauty, flaxen blond hair, and names beginning with C, the novel's construction and writing style strip it of any joy. Guilty pleasure or no, redeeming value or no, the book is horribly written. It's not impossible to read, but it is an unenjoyable waste of time.
Novels about incest intrigue me, sometimes for the thought and sympathy they provoke, sometimes for the sympathy and guilty pleasure. But even as an interested reader I still have standards—although not always high, I at least prefer a book whose writing does not make me grimace or inadvertently laugh. Flowers in the Attic has intriguing premise, and the plot twists are interesting if not skillful, but I can't get past the horrible writing. Some readers may not dislike Andrews's style quite as much as I did, but I still don't recommend this book. There are better novels out there—even frivolous ones—that don't bog down their potential by skilless writing."
"I can see from a great deal of the reviews that many of the reviewers are around my age (late twenties, early thirties). Somewhere between Michael Jackson, who was child-like but grabbed his crouch and made faces as if he was in the throes of passion, hot, plastic jelly shoes, biker shorts, big shirts, shoulder pads, breakdancing and Dynasty was this wonderfully awful book. We liked it because Cathy was us. Victimized, misunderstood, niave, hormonal . . . us. We were disturbed by the incest but somewhere under some of us, we either found it so shocking we couldn't turn away or the brother and sister were so Macy's mannequin-good-looking that we forgot at times that "Golly-lolly!", they're brother and sister (I've heard a few girls say they thought that the brother was hot -!). Some of us may have forgiven them because they are prisoners in an attic and we may have heard somewhere that heterosexual inmates have sex with members from their same gender, so wouldn't these two? I read somewhere that Andrews was in a wheelchair and often confined which evidently, proved to be a formative experience for this book. No aspiring author should glean tips on style and voice from this book, but we all have to admit, she did something right because most people loved or hated this book. There are over two hundreds of pages of reviews on it in Goodreads to prove it. Don't see the movie, though. The Academy-award winning actress from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was wasted in that terrible movie. V.C. Andrews had a cameo in it."
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