Flowers In The Attic: 40th Anniversary Edition (Dollanganger Book 1)

Get book 1, 3 and 4 from the series. This comes from a movie addict who dislikes reading and finds a movie instead of the book it's adapted from. The lifetime movies are super corny.This seller is good. Packaging and delivery were satisfactory.

Received as expected.paper quality okayish.amazon packing great.Spoiler: 18+ book.subject matter may be graphic for some people in India .i.e incestuous relationships.

SUPERB

Flowers in the attic starts with the Dollanganger family of six, a happy and content family. But soon tragedy falls at their door with the death of Christopher Sr., the head of the family. Soon, the kids with the mother have to leave their cozy abode and move to their mother’s childhood home in the country, a sprawling mansion of a zillion rooms and servants, the menacing grandmother, and the ever-elusive grandfather.Mother hides her kids so that her father who had initially disinherited her for marrying her cousin, forgives her after all these years, and rewrites her in his will. And she will then take her kids away and all will be able to live a happy life again. The only catch though – the kids have to wait until the grandfather dies and thus, they are confined to the attic, with once-a-day meals.Told from the perspective of a 12 year-old girl, Cathy, this story is one of pure horror and trauma. Psychological and emotional trauma remain prominent throughout this book. The themes of betrayal, fear, dysfunctional childhood, hate, siblinghood, incest, child cruelty, largely define the tone of this book; which could be disturbing to some readers.The kids in this book far too grown up for their age; especially Chris, the elder brother of the four siblings. They all have their temperaments that govern the prose. Their dreams, hopes, aspirations, regrets, desperation, and the longing for a better future, make it for a gripping read. As they grow, the elder two Dollanganger kids are caught between adolescent tides of puberty, that had them breaching limits and thus, introducing the whole incest angle. The youngest kids, Cory and Carrie, closely follow their elder siblings in the growing absence of their mother. It really is just Chris and Cathy, now the surrogate parents of the twins, that lead the story.Mother Dollanganger has her own life to sort in her parents’ home, and it felt quite selfish whilst natural to want a normal life again. That said, how she plots against her kids was horrifying and her efforts to remove them from her life, bone-chilling. Toward, the end, the one big mystery that’s revealed really has the reader’s heart go out to the innocent kids stuck in the attic, unawares of their cruel mother’s scheming. The grandmother, a menacing figure, who tortures them under religious pretexts, making the kids pay for her daughter’s sin, felt all too unfair and much too barbarous.This story is a constant struggle for freedom. Freedom from religious tyranny, from norms of the society, from patriarchy, from unwanted responsibilities, from misery. That they need to have a better life, fast, is at the heart of this novel. Through the kids and the mother, the author has tried to reinstate this one fact strongly. While it is easy for the mother to get married again and lead a life of her own, the kids manage to run away from the castle and what happens of them is a story for the next novel in the Dollanganger series.This book teaches a lot about what real love can make one do – it liberates you, it enslaves you, it calms you, but also hurts you. In a way, young love rules the heart and mind, which was a pattern of live of both the junior and senior men of the Dollanganger family.‘Flowers in the Attic’ is one-of-a-kind psychological slash gothic horror that promises to stay with you forever. It’s a gem of a book for lovers of psychological horror. If you’re looking for some intense reading with characters that will make your life seem better, this is the book for you. I’d not recommend it for kids though for obvious reasons as listed above. I’m now moving on to the next book in the series – Petals on the Wind.

Flowers in the attic attracted a lot of controversy and was even banned in some places when it was first published because of passages describing incest. Fellow Game of Thrones fans would agree when I say nothing can make us cringe anymore. So obviously this book sort of bored me. It was an average read with some drama and a mother worse than Cinderella's stepmother and a grandmother who pours tar over her granddaughter's head (Don't ask!).

I've given this book a five star rating not based on its amazing literary merit, characterization, symbolic referencing or the fact that it is beautifully written, but on the basis that it is 5 star page turning trash.It was recommended to me by someone of whom I should have known better than to be likely to read something of true quality, and within the first few pages I knew that I had been recommended a pile of gratuitous, vacuous airheaded nonsense. However I'm am rather enjoying this light read for its implausible tale of cruelty, greed, and despair, so I'm putting aside my notions of book snobbery and dumbing down because I want to see how the story unfolds.In simplistic terms if I was to compare this book to a magazine it would be 'Take a Break'............................go on you know you want to #guiltypleasures

Still probably the most popular novel put out under the name V C Andrews I can still remember everyone seemingly reading it whilst growing up, indeed I know in my immediate family we all read it. Until now that was the only time I had read this, but I decided to go through it again and see if it was still any good.A gothic tale with incest and other tropes of the genre so this does still make for a good enough read, but of course as there are a number of clichés here this is a bit cheesy. Even at the beginning with a car accident that a policeman recounts to the grieving family, you cannot help but start to laugh, as it is not enough that the driver is killed when hit head-on, but the car has to roll over a number of times and catch light. There are also a number of holes in the tale where the older children know things that they should not, such as where various places are in the strange house they are trapped in, and other incidents. This is a tale that the narrator, Cathy, who was only twelve when this first started, is looking back upon, and of course is the first in a series.Ultimately a tale of skeletons in the family closet, betrayal, greed, forbidden love and selfishness, along with compassion and coming of age, there is a lot of things that go on here, and you just better watch out for a certain foodstuff. As the four children are smuggled into their grandparents’ house, which they have never been to before, so they are kept hidden in a wing, confined to a room and the attic. Due to the actions of the mother and her half-uncle so the mum has been written out of the family will and disowned, but as she tells her children, she is set upon appeasing her father, regaining a place in the will, and thus making them all wealthy. But what should be only a couple of days, and then a week starts to turn into years, so what is really happening?Considered controversial by some on first publication, of course, as seems the norm in the US it was banned in schools and libraries in some areas originally, which of course only fuelled publicity and meant more people bought and read this book than otherwise, meaning that the publishers were in desperate need of a sequel. As with other books by this author and now Andrew Neiderman who took over the mantle when Cleo Virginia Andrews died, so this is aimed more at the young adult market, and probably biased slightly more towards the girls than boys. More so because it does incorporate certain elements from fairy-tales.

A real' Fairy story', with a sadistic grandmother, a neglectful mother, a tragedy early on in the story, and an ailing grandfather. The four beautiful Dollanger children are kept imprisoned in an attic, waiting for their cruel grandfather to die before they can be released.You have to suspend belief in order to get into this story. Treat it as a fantasy, (albeit a rather disturbing one), and you will be as gripped as I was.The children as characters were believable with human flaws and desires, but ultimately it is their love and faith in each other that help them 'survive'.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and was left feeling hollow at the end after the many twists and turns the book took.I had trouble getting into the book, as it had a monotonous and stretched rhythm, mimicking the slow passing of time in the attic. However, after coming to terms with this slow crawl through the days, I was pulled into the pitiful and upsetting lives of these long neglected children.I ended up really empathising with the characters and their plight. When they were betrayed I also felt that keenly. My anger towards certain characters was palpable.An interesting and chilling read

It's a tragic story, for sure, but it is mind-numbing in how slowly the story progresses (which I suppose is part of the point - you the reader need to feel the ennui that the children do). As well as being pretty fantastical, it's also not particularly well-written, and much character detail/background is omitted (presumably so that you will have to read the subsequent novels, which I definitely won't be doing as this one was dull enough).