Review - Flowers in the Attic

Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews

Plot:    Such wonderful children. Such a beautiful mother. Such a lovely house. Such endless terror!

It wasn't that she didn't love her children. She did. But there was a fortune at stake--a fortune that would assure their later happiness if she could keep the children a secret from her dying father.

So she and her mother hid her darlings away in an unused attic.

Just for a little while.

But the brutal days swelled into agonizing years. Now Cathy, Chris, and the twins wait in their cramped and helpless world, stirred by adult dreams, adult desires, served a meager sustenance by an angry, superstitious grandmother who knows that the Devil works in dark and devious ways. Sometimes he sends children to do his work--children who--one by one--must be destroyed....

 'Way upstairs there are

 four secrets hidden.

             Blond, beautiful, innocent

             struggling to stay alive....

Characters:   Cathy

Christopher

Carrie

Cory

Mother (Corrine)

Grandmother

Grandfather

Father

Let me just tell you all that I've been wanting to read this book so much since the day I came across the many reviews of it on Goodreads. I was searching through book recommendations that the site generates when I stumbled across the reviews, and they intrigued me so much, yet I never actively went out to look for a copy of the book.  Only recently when I was doing some Christmas shopping did I notice a copy of “Flowers in the Attic” at my local bookstore, and I grabbed a copy.

The book kept me so interested that I finished it within 3 days (and I didn't even read that much per day), I probably would have finished it sooner if I wasn't too busy. The fact is that the book had so much going for it that I didn't want to put it down!

The story starts out pretty normal, with a happy little family living in ordinary suburbia, a handsome father, beautiful mother, older brother and sister and twin boy and girl rounding it all out. We meet Cathy, Christopher, Cory, Carrie and their parents and they all seem so loving towards each other, the mother seeming eternally in love with the father, the children adoring their parents.

But tragedy strikes and with Corrine having no other way of getting her family out of their dire situation they leave in the night to end up at Corrine’s childhood home of Foxworth Hall, where her mother is a cruel old women, and her father is an ailing old religious man. But there is one catch. Corrine’s parents are stinking rich, but the only way for her to get her hands on these riches are to pretend that her children do not exist! So she lets her mother lock them in a single room with steps to the attic, and this is where the horrors begin.

Cathy and Chris grow up in this place, but the twins seem to be stagnating while the other two bloom. Shut up in an old dreary attic for about 3 years, no sunlight, no wind brushing against their cheeks, no feeling of the rain tumbling down onto their heads. The children receive rich gifts from their doting mother, until this too stops and she becomes less interested in her children.

Secrets are exposed, lies are told and terrible things happen to the children. The book is filled with fear, drama, horror, intrigue, love and beauty. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an easy read, although it being rather intense, it still is easy to read.

Next I’m purchasing the follow up to this one called Petals on the Wind…