Product Description

Everyone Says
Her Mother Was Crazy.
Is She Doomed to Repeat the Past?

Up in the attic, that's where Alice's mother used to escape to...and it's where, so Alice has been told, she plotted the murder of her own stepfather. Now, years later, with her mother locked away for life, the attic is where Alice finds comfort in her aloneness, writing poetry and painting pictures. When Alice finally finds the courage to come out of her shell, exchanging her dowdy looks for flattering clothes and makeup, her life completely opens up -- she even attends the prom with a cute, popular boy. But it's a night that turns quickly tragic -- sending her newfound happiness crashing down around her, and hurtling Alice into a shattering new life, one that leads her to a shocking reunion with the shadows she had fled.

From the imagination behind Flowers in the Attic comes a sensational new novel that spins a seductive web between fantasies and lies -- and uncovers the price for keeping secrets in the shadows.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68392 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 416 pages

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 thrilling new series featuring the March family continues with Scattered Leaves, forthcoming from Pocket Books. 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.

1

My Mother's Daughter

I sit by the window in the attic that looks out on the wooded area behind the Doral House, just the way I imagined my mother had done more than sixteen years ago when she was about my age. This year heavy March and early April rains had turned the trees and foliage so plush and thick in upstate New York that sunlight was barely able to reach the forest floor. While I sit here, I try to envision and understand what it was like to feel like a bird in a cage, especially a bird that had flown into the cage deliberately and then locked the door behind her, for that was what my mother had done. However, unlike a bird, she couldn't sing or flutter about too noisily.

My mother had turned herself into a silent prisoner, mute and ghostly, and even though I was created up in this attic, fathered by my grandparents' son, Jesse, while he and my aunt Zipporah hid my mother in this attic after she had killed her stepfather, Harry Pearson, I was, for all practical purposes, born without parents.

Almost from the first day I was nurtured and began my relationship with the people caring for me, the people who were supposed to love me and whom I was supposed to love, I understood them to be Grandma and Grandpa, not Mommy and Daddy.

Neither pretended to be anything more.

Of course, I can't remember exactly when I heard the words Mama and Papa, Mother and Father, Mommy and Daddy. Maybe I first heard them watching television, watching other little girls and boys my age being cared for by younger people. Even then I began to feel I was different and began to understand that someone else, someone very important, was missing from my world, my life. Now, years later, I still feel like someone who had part of herself amputated even before she was born.

I imagine a child psychologist would have a field day with all this. He or she might even decide to do an article about me for some therapy magazine. My classmates -- and even my teachers -- would not be surprised if my picture appeared on the front page of Child Psychology or some such publication. I'm sure I don't do myself any good or change their minds either by keeping so much to myself or, especially, by the way I dress. I can't help being drawn to darker colors and blouses, skirts and shoes that detract from my appearance. I wear clothing usually a size or two too big, things women my grandmother's age would wear. In fact the other girls call my wardrobe Granny clothes. They bob their heads and cluck like hens about me whenever I walk by in the school hallways.

I've always deliberately kept my hair cut a little too short, and, unlike most girls my age, I never wore lipstick, trimmed my eyebrows or used any makeup. I had no mother or older sister to show me how, and my grandmother has never offered to do so, but I'm sure I've refrained from doing any of those things for other reasons, too.

I readily admit one reason to myself. I am fully aware that I have made choices that will keep boys from noticing me or caring about me, including deliberately wearing clothing that makes me uninteresting. The reason is simply that I wish I really was invisible or at least slowly disappearing, and being ignored helps me feel as if I am. I know all this contributes toward why people think me somewhat weird, so in a real sense, I suppose I am at fault. I am a bit mad.

And it isn't just my fellow students who remark about me. Over the past sixteen years, I probably heard some adult whisper something like "That girl should see a psychiatrist" a dozen times if I heard it once, and even if people didn't say it, they surely thought it. I could see it in their eyes as they followed me along while I walked with my head down, skulking through the village of Sandburg or to the Doral House.

It was interesting to me that I could not refer to where I lived as home. To this day I call it the Doral House, as if I knew instinctively that I was living in a place that was as temporary for me as the various small hotels and tourist houses in this New York mountain area were for vacationers.

Other girls and boys my age would say they had to get home, whereas I would say, "I have to get back to the Doral House." I made it sound like a safe haven, like my private embassy where I had diplomatic privileges and immunities. Once I was shut up inside it, no one could bother me, no one could send any accusatory darts from his or her eyes, and none of their dark whispers could penetrate the walls.

In a very true sense, then, my mother, the woman I had yet to meet, had turned me into a prisoner as well. That was why it wasn't all that difficult for me to spend so much time alone up here and why I would sit by this attic window for hours looking out at the world the way she had. The questions I would ask myself from the moment I understood the story, as well as the questions I knew to be on everyone else's minds, were, What else did she pass on to me? What similar demon hovered under my breast? What would I become? Would I end up in an attic of my own making?

As I imagined her doing, I would sprawl and put my ear to the floor to listen to the muffled sounds and voices below to try to picture what everyone was doing. I wanted to feel exactly the way she had felt. For most of her day, this was her only contact with anyone. I thought the loneliness would have been enough to drive her mad, even if she had come up here in a clearly sane state of mind.

The only pictures I have of my mother were the pictures my aunt Zipporah had of the two of them. If looking at these pictures could wear the image down, they would have disappeared long ago. It was like studying the Mona Lisa to see what clues I could find in that smile, those eyes, the turn of her mouth, the way she held her head. I even studied how my mother cupped her fingers against her hip in one picture. Did she always do that? Did it mean she was always tense, afraid? Who was she? What was her voice like? Was mine at all similar? What about her laugh? Was it short and insecure like mine, or was she totally uninhibited?

Babies cling so firmly to all those magical little things about their mothers. They are reassured by their mothers' smiles. Their mothers' love and the melodic flow of their mothers' praises help them feel safe, comforted, but, most important, never alone. I had to imagine all that, pretend I had heard it. Was it part of my madness that I thought I could hear her whispering up here or thought I had caught a glimpse of her dressed in a shadow's movement caused by the sun and clouds and especially the moon? Or was it all just my desperate need to know?

I could see the unhappiness on my grandparents' faces whenever I had the courage to ask about my mother, and I especially could see the fear in my grandmother's eyes. It was like asking about the devil. It was better not to ask, not to be curious, but what child would not want to know? It was what drove orphans to pursue their origins, for to know as much as you could about your parents meant you would know so much more about yourself.

It was in fact the way to find the answer to the haunting question we all ask about ourselves, perhaps all our lives. Who am I? And not just who am I to other people, but who am I to myself?

For me the answer was buried in the twisted and crooked way my history was entwined. To discover the answer, I had to unravel it.

At first it was all told to me in simple ways, like my grandmother explaining what a grandmother was really supposed to be and what she was now. Whether she intended to do it or not, she made it clear to me that even though she was doing what a mother should be doing, she could never fully fill a mother's shoes. Of course, as soon as I understood, I wanted to know why I didn't have a mother or a father with whom I lived just as other girls and boys my age did.

"The reason you don't have a mother and a father is because people are supposed to get married first and plan when to have their children so they could take care of them properly," she said. "Yours didn't."

She didn't come right out and call me a mistake. She told me I was as unexpected as a sudden summer thunderstorm. I actually used to think I fell out of the sky, came floating down like a leaf from a tree to settle at their front door. Sometimes, I wished it was true, wished that I had been left on their doorstep. It was all so much easier to accept when you believed a stork brought you to your family. That way a baby was his or her own little person and arrived without any baggage, and especially without any dark past. Stork babies were truly like Adam and Eve, original, born with no past, only a future.

However, at an earlier age than most of the girls around me, I learned the so-called Facts of Life, and so the stork, like so many of the fantasies other girls were being told, was swept outside my door. It was too dangerous for me especially not to know the hard, cold realities as soon as possible. According to my grandmother, who still worked as a special-duty nurse at the hospital, teenage pregnancy was practically a raging plague, and after all, wasn't that what happened in this very house? The chance of that happening again was greater for me because of who my mother was. No one came right out and said so, but I could hear it whispered in every dark corner. I could feel it. It was palpable in every fearful glance. As Karen Stoker's daughter, I was more susceptible to weakness and lust than most girls my age would be. I must be aware of that at all times and therefore be extra cautious.

Maybe that was an even more important reason why I did everything I could to keep boys from noticing me. I was afraid it was true, afraid of myself. "Stay out of the water and you can't drown," I told myself. For a long time, it wasn't all that difficult for me to do. Boys didn't look at me with desire, only amusement.

Being she was a nurse, my grandmother was always good about explaining the mechanics of sex. She made it sound as impersonal as the workings of a car engine, maybe to ke...

Customer Reviews

No More
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???

The guy above me, Mr. Foxworth, is clearly being paid to write such a sparkling review for each and every loaf that Mr. Neiderman pinches out. He reviews every single new VCA book with the same meaningless praise. Disregard his words.

He laughed, she laughed, we all laughed
I haven't read a "V. C. Andrews" book since I was a teenager, so I'm not sure what made me pick this one up. It has all the promise of those books I used to devour - a mysterious attic, religious zealotry, grandparents with questionable motives, an insane, murderous mother. But, after finishing the book I can't help but think - what? That's it? The grandparents are nice people. The religious zealot was just a ruse made up by a teenage boy. The attic was just another room in a gigantic house. The psychotic mother was benign and harmless. What? Is this what passes for a V. C. Andrews novel these days? Aside from the fact that this is a pretty dry story that doesn't really lead anywhere, a lot of the dialog is awful, especially from Craig, the star of the baseball team and most popular guy in school, but who sounds like he's in his 60s whenever he opens his mouth. And someone is always laughing - you can't turn a page without someone saying something and getting a laugh in response, when nothing was funny to begin with. (These are just the minor nitpicks. I wouldn't know where to begin if I was going to tear the story apart.)

I have no idea, and don't really care, why they still publish books under the V. C. Andrews name, besides to make money. This book has a lot of classic V. C. Andrews ideas going on, but they lead absolutely nowhere.

Enough is enough!
[...] I remember starting with "Celeste" a couple of years ago and thinking, "wow, that's actually quite a good, different idea he's coming up with!" At least the first third of the book. From there the whole series went downhill again.

The Dollangangers were classic, the Casteels a milestone. The Cutlers, though copying awfully much from the Casteels, a very exciting reading experience. The Landrys started off well and unfortunately got sucked up into too implausible storylines but were overall good, so were the Logans, I particularly liked Melody's extraordinary strong character and Olivia in the fifth book, a very extreme VCA anti-heroine fighting her way through every possible struggle. The downfall slowly came with the Hudsons (even though I liked the first book) and needless Miniseries. The DeBeers were the first slam in the face, followed by one inexcusable mistake after the other. The Secrets-series might hit Neiderman's peak of madness. I always felt kind of sick imagining that an old man actually writes from a young girl's perspective, but whatever. I figured with the Cutlers and Landrys he was carrying VCA's ideas further - but hello, all this pervert-lesbianism in the Shadows-series? Written by a MAN? Sick!! And the Early Spring and Secrets novels weren't better either. Lack of character, lack of story, lack of everything, just throw in some self-pity and teenage sex and everyone will like it. One lousy, contradicting plothole, what Neiderman did to VCA's legacy is unforgivable.

[...] I used to love V.C. Andrews novels, now I hate them. Enough is enough. Stop dragging her in the mud.