V.C. Andrews: Flowers in the Attic (Group Read #1)

“For I think of us more as flowers in the attic. Paper flowers. Born so brightly colored, and fading duller through all those long, grim, dreary, nightmarish days when we were held prisoners of hope, and kept captives by greed.’ (location 33-38)

So apparently every teenager in the US has read Flowers in the Attic. I’ve never heard of it. But when Heather suggested a group read over at insatiable booksluts, I thought it sounded interesting and decided to join. I didn’t know much about what I was getting myself into except that it was something about a group of kids being locked in the attic and about some really nasty grandparents.
So after reading the first part of the book, I can easily see why this has been so popular among teenagers – I would definitely have loved it if I had read it some twenty years ago. This is the story of a beautiful and lovely family. Two loving parents, the teenagers Chris and Cathy and then the twins, Cory and Carrie.
But tragedy strikes and their father is killed in a tragic accident: ‘According to the accounts, which we’ve recorded, there was a motorist driving a blue Ford weaving in and out of the left and lane, apparently drunk, and he crashed head-on into your husband’s car. But it seems your husband must have seen the accident coming, for he swerved to avoid a head-on collision, but a piece of machinery had fallen from another car, or truck, and this kept him from copleting his correct defense driving maneuver, which would have saved his life. But as it was, your husband’s much heavier car turned over several times, and still he might have survived, but an oncoming truck, unable to stop, crashed into his car, and again the Cadillac spun over … and the … it caught on fire.’ (location 223-30) And then it caught on fire. Indeed it did.
This leaves the mother to care for the children on her own and since she has no skills, she decides to go back to the parents who disinherited her fifteen years earlier. She drags the kids along, forces them to leave most of their toys behind and doesn’t exactly tell them the reality of the house, they are going to.
Of course, no words could have prepared the children for the reality of their grandparent’s home. Or house rather, there’s not much home about it. The children are forced to stay in one room and are allowed to play in the attic. Their grandmother are a cold and cruel woman who reveals to the children that their parents were in fact related and because of that, in her opinion, the children should never have been born. And she gives the children a list of insane rules they are supposed to follow if they know what’s best for them. And she forces their mother to show them what happens if they don’t – she’s whipped their mother. Thirty-three lashes, one for each year she has lived, and then fifteen lashes, one for each year she lived with the children’s father.
So this is where we are. The children are stuck in a room in a house where they are not wanted. The mother is being whipped by the grandmother and the grandfather is lying in a bed, supposed to die soon.
This is definitely an engaging read. It’s not the best writing I’ve ever read, but it is very entertaining and creepy. I have a pretty good idea about what’s going to happen but I’m still looking very much forward to reading it.