When Lifetime announced Flowers in the Attic was being (re)made into a movie, I hoped My Sweet Audrina would eventually become a movie as well. This weekend marked the debut of My Sweet Audrina on Lifetime (which sadly eliminated some elements including Audrina’s younger sister, Arden’s mother, and “tea time”) which meant it was time to revisit the novel. It was everything I remembered! One of the few novels actually written by V.C. Andrews herself, My Sweet Audrina is filled with the lurid details of the strange Whitefern/Adare family. A warning: spoilers abound from here out.
One of the reasons My Sweet Audrina is right there with Flowers in the Attic as my favorites of V.C. Andrews is that both begin with someone being well-intentioned but getting it horribly wrong. Audrina’s parents wanted to protect her from the terrible crime that had been perpetrated on her, but they also destroyed her sanity and made her further the victim of her half-sister/cousin. And Vera! Where to even begin? Andrews had quite the imagination to dream up someone as wretched as Vera, who organized the gang rape of a nine year old when still only a child herself.
My Sweet Audrina also shows how Andrews developed as a writer after publishing her first novel. This time around there’s much more action even though almost every scene is again set inside an aging mansion. In addition to developing some plausible character motives, Andrews also drops hints about the truth of Audrina’s identity and why her sense of time is so off (Vera attending “summer school” and August seeming more like October with the geese flying south). This disturbing tale is definitely Andrews’s best.
4/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, Pocket Books.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment