Product Description

She grew up in the shadows of lies.

Now the past will come to light.

As a child, she was Baby Celeste, the one thing that kept her mother in touch with reality. But now her mother is in an institution, and sixteen-year-old Celeste Atwell is alone in the world. Adopted by a wealthy couple, Celeste has everything a girl could desire: designer clothes, luxury cars, even a handsome boyfriend. But her indulgence may come at a steep price -- because the secrets hidden within her new family are too dangerous to keep under wraps....

Also in the bestselling Gemini series from V.C. Andrews®-- be sure to read Celeste and Black Cat, available from Pocket Star Books!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #157910 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-01
• Released on: 2005-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743493857
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
One of the most popular authors of all time, V.C. Andrews has been a bestselling phenomenon since the publication of her spellbinding classic Flowers in the Attic. That blockbuster novel began her renowned Dollanganger family saga, which includes Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and Garden of Shadows. Since then, readers have been captivated by more than fifty novels in V.C. Andrews' bestselling series. The new Delia series begins with Delia's Crossing and will continue in Delia's Heart. V.C. Andrews' novels have sold more than one hundred million copies and have been translated into sixteen foreign languages.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I wouldn't go until I had brushed my hair. Mama always spent so much time on my hair while Noble sat watching, as if he were jealous and wanted to be the one to brush it. Sometimes I let him, but he would never do it in front of Mama because of how angry it would make her. He would make these long, deliberate strokes, following the brush with his hand because he needed to feel my hair as much as see it. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I could almost feel his hand guiding the brush. It was hypnotizing then, and it was hypnotizing to remember it now.

"Mother Higgins said right now," Colleen Dorset whined and stamped her foot to snap me out of my reverie. She was eight years old and my roommate for nearly a year. Her mother had given birth to her in an alley and left her in a cardboard box to die, but a passerby heard her wailing and called the police. She lived for two years with a couple who had given her a name, but they divorced, and neither wanted to keep her.

Her eyes were too wide, and her nose too long. She was doomed to end up like me, I thought with my characteristic clairvoyant confidence, and in a flash I saw her whole life pour out before me, splashing on the floor in a pool of endless loneliness. She wasn't strong enough to survive. She was like a baby bird too weak to develop the ability to fly.

"Where that baby bird falls out of the nest," Mama told me, "is where she'll live and die."

Some nest this was, I thought.

"Celeste, you'd better hurry."

"It's all right, Colleen. If they don't wait, they don't matter," I said with such indifference, she nearly burst into tears. How she wished there was someone asking after her. She was like someone starving watching someone in a restaurant wasting food.

I took a deep breath and left the small, almost claustrophobic room I shared with her. There was barely enough space for the two beds and the dresser with the mirror above it. The walls were bare, and we had only one small window that looked out at another wall of the building. It didn't matter. The view I had was a view I owned in my memory, a view among others I gazed back at the way people peruse family albums.

The walk to the headmistress's office suddenly seemed longer than ever. With every step I took, the inadequately lit hallway stretched out another ten. It was as if I was moving through a long, dark tunnel, working my way back up to the light. Just like Sisyphus in the Greek myth we had just read in school, I was doomed never to reach the end of my long and difficult climb. Each time I approached the end, I fell back and had to begin again, as though I were someone caught in an eternal replay, someone tormented by wicked Fate.

Despite the act I put on for Colleen, as soon as I was told I was to meet with a married couple who might want to become my foster parents and perhaps adopt me, my heart started to thump with anticipation. The invitation to an interview came as a total surprise; it had been years since anyone had any interest in me, and I had just celebrated my seventeenth birthday. Most married couples coming to the orphanage look for much younger children, especially ones just born. Who would want to take in a teenager these days, especially me? I wondered. As one of my counselors, Dr. Sackett, once told me, "Celeste, you have to realize you come with a great deal more baggage than the average orphan child."

The baggage wasn't boxes of dresses and shoes either. He was referring to my past, the stigma I carried because of my unusual family and our history. Few potential foster parents look at you as your own person. It's not difficult to see the questions in their eyes. What bad habits did this one inherit? How has she been twisted and shaped by her past, and how are we going to handle it? Why should we take on any surprises?

None of this was truer for anyone than it was for me. I had been labeled "odd," "strange," "unusual," "difficult," and even "weird." I knew what rejection was like. I had been nearly adopted once before and returned like so much damaged goods. I could almost hear the Prescotts, the elderly couple who had taken me into their lives, return to the children's protection agency and, as if speaking to someone in a department store return and exchange department, complain, "She doesn't work for us. Please give us a refund."

Today, perhaps because of this new possibility, that entire experience rushed over the walls of my memory, where it had been kept dammed up for so long. It pushed much of my past over with it as well, so that while I walked from my room to the office to meet with this new couple, the most dramatic events of my life began to replay. It was as if I had lived and died once before.

Truthfully, I have always felt like someone who had been born twice, but not in any religious sense. It wasn't that I had some new awakening after which I could see the world in a different light, see truth and all the miracles and wonders that others who were not reborn did not see. No, first I was born and lived in a place where miracles and wonders were taken for granted, where spirits moved along the breezes like smoke, and where whispers and soft laughter came out of the darkness daily. None of it surprised me, and none of it frightened me. I believed it was all there to protect me, to keep me wrapped comfortably in a spiritual cocoon my mother had spun on her magic loom.

We lived in upstate New York on a farm that had belonged to my family for decades and legally still belongs to me. I was a true anomaly because I was and remained an orphan with an inheritance, property held in trust and managed by my mother's attorney, Mr.

Deward Lee Nokleby-Cook. I knew little more about it, but more than one headmistress or counselor had shaken her finger at me and reminded me I had far more than the other orphans.

The reminder wasn't made to make me feel better about myself. Oh no. It was meant to encourage me to behave and obey every rule and every command, and was usually held over my head like some sort of branding iron. After all, property, having anything of value, meant more responsibility, and more responsibility meant you had to be more mature. If they had it their way, I would have completely skipped my childhood -- not that a childhood in an orphanage was anything to rave about, anyway. I wish I could forget it all forever, every moment, every hour, every day, and not have it all come up inside me like so much sour milk.

Despite the fact that I was a little more than six when I left the farm, I still remembered it quite vividly. Perhaps that is because my time there was so dramatic, so intense. For most of my infancy, I was kept under lock and key, hidden away from the public. Even though my mother thought my birth was a miraculous wonder, or perhaps because of that, my birth was guarded as the deepest, most treasured family secret. I was made to feel like someone very special. Consequently, the house itself for nearly my first five years was my only world. I knew every crack and cranny, where I could make the floor creak, where I could crawl and hide, and where there were scratches and nicks in the baseboard, each mark evidence of the mysterious inhabitants who had come before me and still hovered about behind curtains or even under my bed.

For most of my life at the farm, I was taken out after dark and saw the world outside in the daytime only through a window. I could sit for hours and hours and stare at the birds, the clouds, the trees and leaves swaying in the wind. I was mesmerized by all of it, the way other children my age were hypnotized by television.

I had only one real companion, my brother, Noble. My cousin Panther was just a baby then, and I often helped care for him, but I was also jealous of any attention he stole from my mother and brother, attention that would have been directed at me. Right from the beginning, I resented it when he and his mother, Betsy, came to live with us.

Betsy had lived with us before. She had moved in soon after her father married Mother. I was never quite sure if he was my real father as well, but immediately he wanted me to call him Daddy. He died before Betsy returned. She had run off with a boyfriend, and she didn't even know he had died. The whole time she was away, she had never called or even written a letter to tell her father where she was, but when she returned and learned of his death, she was very angry. I remember she blamed us for her father's death, but she was even angrier about the way her inheritance was to be distributed. The air in the house felt filled with static. Mother stopped smiling. There were ominous whispers in every shadow, and those shadows grew deeper, darker, and wider every passing day, until I thought we would be living in darkness and no one would be able to see me, even Noble.

Before Panther's mother, Betsy, had invaded our home and spoiled our lives, I had Noble completely to myself. He was the one who took me out, the one with whom I worked in the herbal garden and took walks about our farm when I was finally permitted to be out in the daytime. Often he read with me in the living room and carried me to my bedroom to put me asleep. He taught me the names of flowers and insects and birds. We were practically inseparable. I felt he loved me even more than my mother did. I was so sure that someday I was to understand why; someday, I would understand it all.

And then one day he disappeared. I can't think of it any other way or of him as anything but who he had been to me. It was truly as if some wicked witch had waved her wand over him and in an instant turned him into the young girl I had been told was my half sister, Celeste, after whom I had been named. I had seen pictures of her many times in our family albums and heard stories about her, describing how bright she was, how pretty. It would be years before I would understand it, and even then I would wonder if everyone else was mistaken and not me. However, I would learn that my mother believed it was Celeste who had died in a tragic fishing accident, and no...

Customer Reviews

A huge disappointment
After reading Black Cat(which I rated a 3 out of 5) I was only eager to read Child of Darkness to learn where Celeste and Baby Celeste end up. Well this book barely touches on the life of Celeste- she is only in one scene of the book, and she is locked away in a mental institution. Baby Celeste is nothing of the pragmatic youth we see in Black Cat. She seems to be an ordinary girl(which is a breath of fresh air) but the story has very little plot, the resolution is so calcualted it is insulting and the ending......well there is very little I can say about the ending without seeming crude, angry and snobbish. All and all I believe Black Cat is a pulitzer winning book in comparison to this novel. The ghost writer doesnt even try to caputre the essence of V.C. Andrews. Dont even waste your time on such nonsense. Dont even read it for free in a bookstore- pick up another V.C. Andrews book. This one is by far the worst.

STOP IT
This has to stop, seriously. When Neiderman first ghostwrote for VCA, he did a decent job. I liked the Cutler series, and he did a good job of finishing up the books that VCA had started but didn't finish for the Dollanganger and Casteel series. The Landry and Logan series, while not the best, were still very decent, and I enjoyed them. However, it all started to go downhill with Orphans. That was not what VCA would have written. I endured the Hudson and DeBeers series with disgust. The April Shadows and Broken Flower series are making VCA spin in her grave right now. Mr. Neriderman, please stop writing for VCA and go back to your own work. You're a old man, stop writing as if you were a young girl. Put the VCA name to rest, did you know there's a online petition circulating around demanding that you stop writing for VCA???

I found myself confused and frustrated with this series. You know that you should feel sorry for Celeste, but after reading Black Cat, you don't. She is GROWN, yet she let her mother push her around, and Mom is one VERY f---ed up person. And this third book in Gemini just... left things hanging, without satisfaction or questions answered. I ended up selling these books on eBay because I wanted some of my money back and more room on my bookshelf for better books.

WORTH THE READ FOR THE SHOCKING ENDING!
Well, Andrew. Neiderman has done it again. Another fine V. C. Andrews book!

I have to admit, that for part of the book, I was perplexed. I wondered what this had to do with the Atwell family. Where was (big) Celeste? What was happening at the Atwell farm? Then, as Celeste's guardian family (especially Ami) got more weird and more threatening, I understood the reasoning behind this story. After all, Mama was dead and (big) Celeste was mentally ill and in a home. Where else could the story go? We needed to examing (little) Celeste's strange journey home. The ending left me breathless and excited to write this review.

Okay, I've never seen a series that more cries out for BOTH a prequel and a sequel. Let's see a prequel that tells us how Mama got so weird. Let's see a sequel to see how Celeste adapts to life on the Atwell farm, how she and (big) Celeste, and does Noble's spirit form ever return?

One thing done exceptionally well in the series by Mr. Neiderman was the "spiritual" and "physic" storyline. Did Mama and eventually (little) Celeste really communicate with spirits? Or were they just wacko? And will we ever know?

While I wait for APRIL SHOWERS, I seriously ask Mr. Neiderman and Pocket Books to think about providing us with that much needed prequel and sequel to this, the GEMINI series. I know I would buy it and I am sure millions of VCA fans would too! And another thing, why not a book about Basil, Wade, and Ami? These freaks deserve to have their story told too! Maybe a stand-alone book like MY SWEET AUDRINA.

Bravo for a fine job done!