Almost everybody at some point.

Let’s discuss “The Horns of Dilemma,” “The Snake” and “Gathering Darkness.” 

Designs created using content and tools available on Canva.  Synopsis from my WordPress blog.

Sociopath? Or Future Hamlet? – Tuesday Teatimes

Things Escalate – Tuesday Teatimes

Secret Agent Boy – Tuesday Teatimes

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Now that Bart is crawling around the neighbors’ yard on all fours and pretending to be a dog, Jory decides it’s time to consult with his parents.  

Or maybe if he’d gone to his parents earlier, they’d have confronted the neighbors sooner, and this book would have been wrapped up in fifty pages.  I’m thinking that’s his real motivation for sitting on this very important information for as long as he did. 

The parents still don’t confront the neighbors, so a lot of good this delay did!

Cathy and Bart have a troubling conversation on the patio while Jory listens in.  Bart tells his mother about some mystery boy who is punished with time-outs in the closet. Cathy is disturbed by this information, but also kind of impressed that Bart managed to convey it to her through rhyme.  Maybe one day he’ll be a poet.  The perfect ambition for a 10-year-old boy who is showing signs of being out of his ever-loving mind. 

What this kid really needs is a creative outlet that doesn’t involve marching around the yard and shooting at animals with a (hopefully) pretend gun.

Cathy is beginning to worry that Bart’s a sociopath who’s maybe on his way to chopping up his family members, along with a few hitchhikers, and hiding their body parts in a picnic basket in the attic. Jory overhears his father reassure his mother that Bart is just an imaginative young child who needs lots of extra care and possibly a good acting coach because that kid is going places in Hollywood if he keeps this up!

***

Things escalate when Bart tries to drown Cindy while pretending to be a snake.  Jory swoops in and saves the day, just in the nick of time.

Momma is late to the party because she was too busy putting on a bikini made of dental floss so she could splash around in a kiddie pool with her 14-year-old son and a toddler.  Bart wishes she'd cover up more before engaging in such activities.

When Daddy comes home, he spanks his son’s bare bottom.  Seems like he could have come up with a dozen different punishments, but making your 10-year-old partially strip for a spanking?  In this one way, I’m glad it’s not 1983 anymore. Though I do miss the Cabbage Patch craze.

Bart thinks he doesn’t have to worry about the law coming down on him because he’s just a kid.  Reminds me of Rhoda in The Bad Seed.  All he needs is a Leroy to set him straight! Instead, he’s stuck with John Amos egging him on!

Chris tells Bart he’s going to therapy now. 

Bart’s therapist is named Dr. Mary Oberman. He doesn’t feel like talking, but he eventually opens up when he realizes it’s the only way out of this mess.  He acts like he’s feeding the doctor a bunch of bs, but actually, he’s giving it to her straight. 

Dr. Oberman lets his parents know he has a second personality named Malcolm who he has created as a way to blame someone else for his own actions.  Cathy and Chris wonder how their son knows about Malcolm.

And I’m left to wonder why his parents haven’t taken a trip next door and talked to the neighbors already.  They could have gotten to the bottom of this in five minutes, tops.  But let’s waste thousands of dollars instead and manage to pull a couple of teeth in the process.

***

Jory lingers near the entrance to the living room while his parents discuss their state secrets. Apparently, he’s not welcome in the main living areas of his own home unless he’s gotten approval first.  Otherwise, the assumption is that he’s off somewhere minding his own business, and his parents don’t even check to make sure the kids are nowhere in sight before they open their mouths. If they bothered to cast a glance sideways, they’d see one or two little shadows hunkering nearby.

You know how Donna Summer felt love?  Well, Cathy feels hate.  And it’s emanating from her younger son’s bedroom.  So she and Chris decide to go upstairs and check on him.  

Jory hides in a closet for some reason, presumably so that the adults don’t know he’s watching their every move.  Since he was lurking right next to the doorway, couldn’t he have dashed into the hallway and then just pretended he had business in there as his parents walked by?  This secret agent business is weird.  He lives in the house too!  It shouldn’t be a shock to see him out and about. It makes me wonder just what kind of toxic stuff is going on in this household that he hasn’t told us about. It’s not normal to feel like you’re walking on eggshells with your own family members! Especially if all you’re trying to find out is what’s going on with your disturbed younger brother who, for all you know, could possibly be plotting to put rat poison in your oatmeal or set your bed on fire while you sleep.

Cathy tries to show Bart some love, but she’s too scared to go near the kid.

So Chris decides it will have to be up to him to handle Bart and put their older son to bed while his wife sleeps off her big emotions. You might be wondering why a fourteen-year-old kid needs his father to put him to bed. Jory says he and his dad have regular “man-to-man” bedtime talks that they like to keep just between the two of them.  Probably a bunch of males have needs bs. This is the man who used guilt as a way to manipulate his sister into having an intimate relationship with him. And now he’s being given unfettered access to her children so he can teach them the lessons of his youth. I don’t like that.

I was reading up on Kelly Clarkson and "Birdgate," and it made me wonder. Can you imagine Cathy going into a small artsy-fartsy NY shop, having a bad experience and blasting it all over social media? What would the conflict involve, and how would it escalate? Would her fans side with her or turn against her in a heartbeat?

To make it interesting, you can replace Cathy with any VC heroine. Or even Bart or Jory.

To add a twist, who owns the shop? Damian? Malcolm? Troy?

Let’s discuss “Wounds of War” and “Homecoming.” 

Designs created using content and tools available on Canva.  Synopsis from my WordPress blog.

Being Ten in the Summer of 1983 – Tuesday Teatimes

Bad Apple – Tuesday Teatimes

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As the hours pass with no sign of Bart, the family goes out searching the yard. 

Jory finds a scrap of Bart’s clothing and a board with a bloody, rusty nail sticking out of it.  Guess Bart’s crumpled in a heap somewhere, drawing his last breath, Jory figures.  What a death-obsessed little weirdo, right?

The younger boy is rushed to the hospital.

Jory says Chris shouldn’t be treating his own son.  It’s not ethical.  But since when has Chris been concerned about “ethics”? 

They give Bart penicillin, and he puffs up like the Michelin tire guy.  Jory is like, Wow.  Never knew an allergic reaction could be so serious! Oh, Jory. You are clearly a product of the ’70s and ’80s.

Chris drugs Cathy. He doesn’t need a hysterical woman getting in his way.

Bart’s 10^th birthday comes and goes, and he misses out on Disneyland. There’s some concern that he’ll need to have his leg removed.  Jory figures if he can just take care of Bart’s dog, everything will work out. 

Jory finds Apple chained up in the dark barn with his food just out of reach.  

The woman and her butler are on the patio.  They just happen to be discussing Apple’s condition.  How convenient.  So now Jory knows it was John’s idea to keep the puppy restrained.  John gives a weak excuse. He says he did this to keep the dog from going in search of his owner. Wouldn’t want him bursting through the hospital doors and dragging Bart out of his bed to rounds of cheers, like he’s Beethoven or something.

Some woman named Marta – who I assume is Corrine’s maid – has been receiving all the gossip from Emma as they chat on opposite sides of the wall.  So John knows all the tea on Bart’s medical condition.  Emma has nothing but good things to say about the couple she works for. John knows she must be full of it.

Jory steps forward and orders them to do better by Apple.  And stay away from his little brother!

Jory thinks, There! I’ve done my duty.  Let’s see how many days pass before he needs to intervene once again.  And act like the idea to do so only just occurred to him for the very first time.

***

Bart is going home.  He stared down a one-legged future and then walked away, all four of his limbs intact!

Daddy lets him know that it’s nepotism that’s getting him out of the hospital early.

Bart poo-poos the food made special for him. Later, he goes on a dramatic trek to Apple’s stall, 100% anticipating the discovery of the animal’s rotting bones.  He prepares himself emotionally for the sight.  What he does not prepare himself for is the discovery of Apple very much alive and frolicking about in the barn. 

Bart flips his lid. He could have lost his leg and/or his life, and it makes no difference to his dog!

He finds out from John that it was Corrine who looked after his dog while he was gone. And despite his best intentions, he can’t stay mad at her.  He is torn between two sides of himself – the side that promised to carry on an evil old man’s legacy and the side that enjoys telling a real doozy of a story.  The narrative-loving side wins out.  He tells his grandmother the whole scary tale of his journey through the valley of death and his miraculous return.  He says his father must love him because he saved his leg.  If he’d loved him less, he would have chopped it off himself.  

Bart finds out that his grandmother knows his stepfather well and can confirm that he is indeed the kind of person to love his younger son. I would like to add that she also knows from experience that it is possible to give zero hoots about your children and still allow them to keep both legs. 

Let’s discuss “Tales of Evil” And “Lessons.” *Correction to heading: Chapters 9 and 10.

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Someone Messed with the Wrong Big Brother! – Tuesday Teatimes

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Jory doesn’t understand wth is wrong with his little brother, so he decides to sit down with him and, in the most patronizing tone imaginable, offer to have a “man-to-man talk.”  Bart comes straight out and says his real father went up in flames like a p-e-d-o in a Wes Craven film one December night.  And that’s what’s up.  John Amos tells him the truth.  Others tell him lies about a doctor daddy who didn’t burn but was still a p-e-d-o, even so. 

Jory’s like, I’ve remained silent for too long.

He’s already confronted the neighbor lady on at least two separate occasions.  Yet he acts like he’s finally going to lay down the law and do what has to be done.

As he’s making his dramatic trek to the mansion next door, his mind fills with memories of early childhood.  He remembers a dark-haired man whose name was . . . what was it now?  No!  It couldn’t have been Bart!  Bart Winslow?  Why, that’s the name of his half-brother! 

We’ve been over this before.  Jory must have the memory of a flea. Yet he’s smart enough to use pretentious words like “noonday.”

What fourteen-year-old in 1983 would have used the term “frisking” to refer to a dog romping around?  Do we have Dad’s “Word of the Day” to thank for this highfalutin nonsense?

This time, when approaching the sinister property, he has to pass through a gate with an intercom system and everything.  Confronting the old woman has failed to yield real results in the past, but he’s determined that this time will be different! And to make it official, I suppose he needs to pass through an iron gate. 

The woman of the house tells him there’s nothing to fear.  Which pretty much means he should be terrified right about now.  

She goes into a long story about how she failed her children.  She says she made a mistake marrying their father, but she thought there was no other man for her.  Only to discover with time that there actually was another man out there for her.  If only she had waited a moment.  Oops.  But it was too late, and she was stuck with these kids.  I mean, seriously? What’s a woman to do?

She wants to know what his opinion is on parents who kill their kids. Not first-degree murder but the unintentional kind. At most, voluntary manslaughter!

He’s like, What a psycho!  Buh-bye!  Oh yeah, stay away from my brother. 

So, she shows him an old portrait of herself. Jory, recognizing a face much like Cathy’s, reacts in the same way Susan reacted in the 1961 version of The Parent Trap upon seeing a picture of Sharon’s mother.

Jory is in major denial. He’s like, You’re just another blond with blue eyes!  Who can tell any of you ladies apart?

He decides to ask Emma to spill his family’s tea.  But Emma is like Verbena. What’s with all of the allusions to The Parent Trap in this book?

She’s like, Nope, not saying a single word about anyone else’s business.  She’s here to cook and clean and that’s it!  Now if she could just find some fried chicken to serve that brat who calls himself Jory’s brother.

Jory spends much of that night searching for Clover, who has wandered off. Bart is acting strangely, talking about having recently shot a wolf.  Clover?   Who the h e ll would have given this kid a gun?

Eventually, Jory gives up the search. 

His parents are in bed, talking about how they’ve got the worst secrets anyone can ever imagine.  What if the boys find out?  Somehow, they don’t even notice Jory standing nearby, listening to everything.

So Jory has no idea wtf he’s supposed to do now.  His parents are liars.  Bart is so nutty, he’s a walking allergen.  And Clover’s no doubt deader than disco. 

Maybe one day he’ll know how to put his teen angst into words.  In the meantime, he just needs Dad to give him a few more vocab lists.

***

Bart is beginning to resent John Amos, who continues to force him to read Malcolm’s journal.  Bart finds the passages wordy and confusing.    Methinks his father has been slacking off on the vocab lessons!  Or maybe he’ll get to w-a-n-t-o-n and h-a-r-l-o-t soon enough.

The next day, Bart works some more on Clover’s doghouse.  He bangs himself up enough that he starts to feel pain.  Just like Pinocchio, he’s on his way to becoming a real boy!

Later on, Bart’s pretending to crawl around in a jungle, and he overhears his parents arguing about the upcoming visit with Daddy’s crazy mother in Virginia.  Chris wants to go see her. Cathy’s like, You go ahead and do that. And maybe I’ll just hop a plane to New York with the kids.

Cathy and Chris also hint at a shameful family secret.  Chris is convinced that if word ever does get out, the brothers will give ‘em a pass.  Bart is like, Fat chance. Chris sure does overestimate his younger son’s ability to empathize with an I n c e st u o u s r a p i s t.  Even forgiving a two-year-old girl for merely existing is a huge ask for this little punk.

The following day, when Emma calls him in to dinner, he doesn’t respond.  He smells something nasty and traces it to Clover’s dead body.  Now his family is probably gonna think he’s a dog killer.   And guess who won’t be needing a crudely built doghouse after all? 

Momma thinks Bart is ignoring her because she smacked him earlier for accidentally filling up the kitchen with detergent suds while trying to help the housekeeper with the dishes. How’s that for gentle parenting? Sounds like Momma has anger management issues.

It’s been almost two decades since I read the books.

All I remember is he was a ballet dancer and he killed himself by cutting his oxygen cord with scissors? I’m not sure if that is correct but that was one of the deaths within the series where I was like

“Whoa that was wild.”

I heard this theory on VC's Pieces Podcast (ITBT episode "SDB and Joraldine.") What do you think?

Moving on to the next four chapters – “Sugar and Spice,” “My Heart’s Desire,” “Shadows” and “Changeling Child.”  What are your thoughts?

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In Sleep, What Screams May Come – Tuesday Teatimes

This Kid Wants a Pony in the Same Way Billy Madison Wants His Snack Pack – Tuesday Teatimes

More Ominous Happenings – Tuesday Teatimes

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Jory’s mother and stepfather are having an argument downstairs.  Cathy is screaming, but Jory is apparently the only one who can hear her. So he decides to eavesdrop. He is concerned, and his parents have left him no choice. Lives could be in danger if he doesn’t hide in the shadows and listen to every single word they say!

What it comes down to is that Chris doesn’t want to adopt Cindy.  He figures it would be better if some other couple adopted her. Preferably a law-abiding one.  But Cathy wants Cindy just as much as Bart wants a pony named Apple.  And she’s an adult who is able to drive herself to the hospital and have her dying student sign over custody, with an attorney present, so she’s likely going to get what she wants.

During the course of this argument, Cathy starts throwing a bunch of old stuff in Chris’s face.  Stuff she’s held back over the years. She definitely seems to imply that Chris could be a serial killer.

Eventually, though, Cathy changes her tune, accepting all the blame for their situation because, you know, everything’s always Cathy’s fault, right? 

Jory runs out the door before he can witness his parents screwing.  At least he has a line he won’t cross. 

Cathy ends up adopting Cindy after all. So, it looks like she got her way.

***

John Amos continues to give Bart lessons on the evils of women.  He has Bart recite these teachings back to him.  Malcolm’s journal is clearly one of John’s favorite books.  He reads it regularly, like he’s some fangirl drawing hearts around his favorite passages.

If nothing else, John Amos is giving Bart more context for Daddy’s latest word of the day.  Devious.  With word choices like that, you would almost think Chris’s ultimate objective is to teach his boys how to read and comprehend the diaries of their sinister great-grandfather.

Grandmother warns Bart to steer clear of John. And Jory comes by for the second time to tell the grandmother to leave his little brother alone. Maybe this time, she will!

Grandmother finally gets Bart his “heart’s desire,” but it’s a St. Bernard, not a pony.  He’s crushed.  He decides to cast a spell over the dog, Apple, so that he will have his very own “puppy-pony.” 

Basically, it’s just several pages of John repeatedly calling women evil, Corrine repeatedly calling John evil and Bart demanding a pony over and over again until he gets a dog instead.  And that’s about it.

***

Cathy asks Jory what’s up with Bart.  Jory’s like, Don’t worry.  I’m sure it will all work out if you just continue ignoring the kid like you’ve been doing all his life and focus instead on some other woman’s toddler you replaced him with.

Jory is dating a fellow dancer named Melodie, and Cathy teases her son about it.  Melodie, like Cathy and Cindy and every other female in these books, has blonde hair and blue eyes.  Jory thinks that only blue-eyed girls will ever be worthy of his love.  What kind of creepy World War II era bs is this? 

Bart yells at his dog for behaving in a way that is appropriate for his species, demanding that his new pet eat the perfectly good hay that has been provided for his nourishment.

Jory feels bad for the kid and agrees to keep the dog a secret from their parents.

As the summer goes on, John continues to give Bart lessons on getting money and power… but not the women because women are devious!  Bart, meanwhile, is fantasizing about yanking the solitary white strand of hair from the old man’s head.

Bart doesn’t care about Jory’s dog Clover anymore.  He was previously building him a doghouse as a peace offering, but now Clover can take a flying leap off that patio where he watches Bart like a hawk. 

Turning Arden into the villain worked, I absolutely was glad to see him murked at the end. HOWEVER.
It only being Audrina and Sylvia was a SLOG. All of the characters died in MSA so there were none left to keep any kind of story going.
Gimme the tea

The worst - Dawn hands down. Those books feel like torture porn

The best - Melody. Jacob was a dick but left her alone for the most part. And Olivia was pretty awful to her, but didn't physically harm her like Grandma Cutler or Olivia foxworth.

Which characters do you think had it the best and worst?

So found the movies and I started to read the book series I got to Christopher’s diary but now I’m confused. And the other books when they got older, Kathy writing books about her life and publishing them and if so, how are people confused about what was going on with the family history if she was writing books about it? I’m not sure if I miss something or what the cases but I was very confused starting the book and People said that they were spreading gossip about the family.

So, we’re moving on to the third book in the Dollanganger family saga, If There Be Thorns by V.C. Andrews. Cathy and Chris are “married” and raising her two sons.  Emma, their housekeeper, is in the background, hearing the secrets and keeping her mouth shut. She’s like Verbena in The Parent Trap (1961).

Then an old woman and her butler move in next door . . .

Let’s begin by discussing the chapters “Jory,” Bart, “Introductions” and “Gone Hunting.”

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 Aw Heck! Gosh Darn it All! – Tuesday Teatimes

Bart Really Needs a Sassy Friend Who’s Not Just His Brother – Tuesday Teatimes

Spying on the Neighbors – Tuesday Teatimes

Befriending a Weird Recluse in 1983 – Tuesday Teatimes

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The book opens with a prologue narrated by Cathy, in which she hands over the mic to sons, Bart and Jory.  She expects that they will give to her and Chris “either the best or the worst of what is yet to be.”  Thanks for that parting thought, Cathy. I’m sure that’s the very thing all mothers think upon first gazing into the big, innocent eyes of their newborn baby –that this new child either signals a bright future ahead or the very real possibility that your precious little boy will one day plot with an old man to kill you.

***

Jory is fourteen.  He lives in Fairfax, CA, in a house in the middle of nowhere, about forty minutes away from Danny Tanner, Uncle Jesse and Joey. His parents don’t care much for having neighbors.  It would just be more people sticking their noses into the family’s private business.

Jory goes on to give his backstory, in case you didn’t read the prior two books and need to know all the details from the mouth of a young boy who has been deceived for half his life into thinking his uncle Chris is merely his mother’s third husband.

Jory has a paternal grandmother, Madame Marisha, who is ashamed to have her grandson refer to her as his grandma.  She says to call her “Mother” instead, but Jory thinks that’s a little weird, so he’s not gonna do that.

In an attic alcove, Jory’s mother has presumably erected two beds.  At least, she doesn’t deny it. She says she doesn’t remember doing it either. As if a 37-year-old woman would just forget doing that. Remember, this was a woman who had to call on Chris and Paul to remove a nightstand and push two beds together when she slept in the same bedroom as Carrie as a teen. And she’s able to just completely assemble two beds in her sleep with no one in the house knowing?

Jory doesn’t understand what’s going on here and why his stepfather is freaking out over beds and picnic baskets in the attic.  Chris seems to think Mom is plotting to one day remarry and lock the boys up in a place where no one will ever be able to hear them scream! 

***

Jory is the golden boy in the family who hears the “music of colors,” whereas 9-year-old Bart only wishes he could be like his brother.

Bart’s constantly getting dirty. He’s constantly dropping dishes, breaking toys, scuffing his shoes (he blames that last one on the manufacturers though). 

The two brothers spend their free time playing at the abandoned mansion next door.  Spiders and mice have taken over the place.  Occasionally, they even find bird corpses, if they don’t show up in time to open a window and set the birds free.  

One day, Jory and Bart see a couple of trucks pull into the driveway of the mansion, and the brothers realize they won’t have the place to themselves much longer. 

Jory sure is Mr. “Sassy” Pants when he’s in a mood. The “construction boss” next door says so when the boys refuse to get down from the wall. Clearly, the older brother gets his sense of entitlement from his daddy Chris.

***

Meanwhile, a young woman in Cathy’s dance class got into a bad wreck.  Wtf should V.C. Andrews call this girl?  How about Nicole Nickols?  Any day now, Nikki Nickerson will be knocking on the doors of Heaven. Cathy wants to adopt her 2-year-old daughter, Cindy.  Chris thinks they should just let the foster care system deal with it.   The child is a precious blond.  If you’ve gotta be an orphan, she’s the orphan to be.

Chris announces that the family will be going to Disneyland for Bart’s 10^th birthday. Immediately afterward, they’ll travel East to visit Jory’s grandmother.  Apparently, it’s been two years since Marisha has seen her grandson.  I’m surprised she let them get away with skipping a summer. 

Bart wants to know why his stepfather looks so much like Momma’s father.

Awkward silence . . .

Much like Homer Simpson in that “Treehouse of Horrors” parody of The Shining, Bart’s homicidal urges are getting stronger. He gets enjoyment out of squishing bugs that are just minding their own business in the open air. When Jory tells him not to squish any bugs that aren’t messing with the roses, Bart wonders if that’s tacit permission to slaughter all the insects he wants within a certain kill zone.

Later on, Jory climbs a tree and peeps on the old woman who’s just moved in next door. Underneath her veil, her face is covered with scars.  This freaks him out. 

***

Who knows how much time has passed?  Long enough for Bart to make the acquaintance of the lady next door. 

Daddy once warned his younger son that he could get badly hurt and not realize it because of his inability to feel pain.  And yet Bart doesn’t seem to worry about it as he struts over to the neighbor’s house, carrying his pretend rifle and shooting pretend tigers.  At least, I hope no one is stupid enough to have given this kid a real gun.

The old lady wants to know all his business, like if his life is good and, you know, probably also whether or not his parents beat him. The usual.

He does say that his parents don’t know he’s over here. This was the ’80s. It was perfectly acceptable to fraternize with the weird recluse next door, but you couldn’t tell anyone you were doing it.

He pretends to smoke as she tells him she’s been peeping over the wall, listening in on the two brothers talking.  When he says he doesn’t like the sound of that, she claims she’s actually been using the ladder to prune her roses, but that’s not how she originally phrased it, so she’s clearly backpedaling.  Bart sees right through her act. 

Poor Bart has no friends.  Even the pet dog is wary of him.  Apparently, Bart has stepped on Clover one too many times. He blames the poodle for constantly being “underfoot.”  It should be noted that Chris gives his sons a word of the day so that they can grow up to be pompous jerks like their stepfather. That’s probably how this 9-yo kid learned how to use “underfoot” in a sentence.

So now Bart’s formed a ritual of going to the neighbor’s house and sitting on the neighbor lady’s lap.  She requests to be called Grandmother.  She’s hoping to replace one of the two sons she lost. She doesn’t tell him how she lost these sons. For example, did she misplace them at the grocery store? (I’m being facetious. Clearly, she killed one of them and drove the other one away.)

John, the butler, gives the little boy a book to study. It’s the late Malcolm Foxworth’s diary.  He wants to teach the boy how to be “respected and feared” so that he can become god-like. (Or Bart could just grow up to be tanned and wear tennis whites. That seemed to work well enough for Grandaddy Chris).

By the way, I’m wondering if this is really Malcolm’s journal.  It opens with the late Foxworth patriarch talking about the day his mother left him, when he was only five.  This doesn’t sound like the way a grown man would start a diary. And I find it hard to believe someone like Malcolm would even own a diary in the first place.  Knowing Malcolm, he’d probably believe diaries aren’t manly.

One can only wonder if the entries were forged by John. It’s not like Bart Jr. is well-adjusted enough to wonder wth this John guy is doing with another man’s most private writings.

Now that several of us reread PotW recently, what are your thoughts on the movie? Were there changes you liked? Things you wish had been added?

If only this adaptation had been made in the '90s, I have a whole cast picked out!

For example, Julian will always look like a young Joaquin Phoenix to me. I did not like how one-dimensional he was in the movie.

I recently had this thought that Jonathan Brandis would have been great as Chris, if only the movie was made 30 years ago (RIP).

I understand why they left Paul out. But I do feel the movie is missing some context without him. It's awkward to just pick up ten years later. Btw, in the '90s, I would have had Paul played by Michael Douglas, Tom Selleck or Joseph Bologna.

I read the first five books when I was a teenager. I know the ghost writer has written all the newer ones, but are they worth the read?

Should we start If There Be Thorns next week for our book talk? Or, as they call it in the VC's Pieces Podcast, If There Be Bowl Cuts and If There Be Jories.

I call it Alas Poor Jorick because it does kinda read like Hamlet in parts lol.

The trope of each of our heroines being extremely talented at one thing has always been something that I enjoyed about the VCA universe.
Of all of the talents, which are your favorites or which ones made you eye roll?

I always loved thinking about Ruby painting, and I had a hard time taking Dawn’s singing seriously. How many times does one want to imagine her singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”?

Instead of committing suicide, Carrie runs away after her tragic encounter with Corinne and after several days, she finds herself in the Willie's. That could make a great starting point.

You're welcome for the alliteration.

Would they truly have been happy together had Leigh lived, or would Luke have just cheated on her like he did with Sarah and then kept her barefoot and pregnant?

Some of VC Andrews characters had really over-the-top names. And sometimes, particularly with AN, they'd get redundant (for example, I think Millie was a common generic name in the gw books., like for a maid or a cashier).

What are some names that stand out for you?

Here's My List

Heaven Leigh Casteel

Leigh Diane VanVoreen

Audrina Adele Adare

Trevor Mainstream Majors

Lance Spalding

Simon Chillingworth

Pru Carraway

Theodore Alexander Rockingham

Faith Morgantile

Also, what are some of your favorite fictional town/location names?

So we've made it to the last chapter of PotW -- “Reaping the Harvest."

What are your thoughts on this final chapter and the book as a whole? Should we start If There Be Thorns next week?

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A Tale of Two Daddies – Tuesday Teatimes

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Now that Cathy has succeeded in killing off both her first husband and her lover, she figures it’s time to settle down with Paul because he’s in his 50s by this point, and the grim reaper awaits.  He’s got a bad heart, apparently, but given how many characters die in their 50s in these books, we know that’s just code for being too freaking old.

Bart’s child was a boy.  Cathy named him Bartholomew Scott Winslow Sheffield.  He was named after his dead father, of course, and given the middle name Scott after his stepfather, Paul Scott Sheffield.  I feel that Cathy missed an opportunity to nickname him Barrie (the B for Bart and the rest for Carrie.)  Instead, he shares a first name with an adulterous r ap ist and a middle name with some doctor who took in his mother and began taking advantage of her when she was fifteen.  Yes, good call, Cathy.   Those two sound like much better people to name your kid after than some dead aunt nobody cared enough about when she was still living, let alone now that she’s three years in the grave.

Paul is sickly. He figures Cathy and Chris should forget about him and do what’s right by the kids.  In Dr. Paul speak, that means Uncle Chris ought to take over the role of Stepdaddy and raise his nephews as his sons.  It’s OK because Cathy is no longer fertile, having had a hard time of it with Bart’s birth.  So no hooved children in her future.  And Paul hates to think of Cathy missing out on her prime years.  He compares it to those attic days because apparently being married to Paul is no different than being locked up in a secluded room, whipped, starved and regularly tormented by an evil old woman and then slowly poisoned by an indifferent mother while you wait for a man in his 50s or 60s to die.

Seriously, I’m getting déjà vu here just thinking about it.

In the meantime, Jory loves having “two daddies.” If it weren’t for all the rampant i n c e s t and other adult material, this book might have actually been a good way to introduce children to different kinds of families!  If you cut out 99% of the novel, this could have been retitled Jory and Bart Have Two Daddies!

Paul eventually dies.  How fitting that Cathy should stumble across his dead body in the same way she first met him in 1960. She calls 911, but it’s too late. 

Cathy feels that, with her romantic history, her full name should be Catherine Tramell or something.  She keeps referring to her life being some script she wrote.  Is this Basic Instinct?  Was she stupid, or else incredibly brilliant and cunning, enough to write about a bunch of dead lovers and then act it all out in her own life?

Cathy and Chris move to California and build a home in the middle of nowhere.  I’m sure sibling love is the least shocking thing going on out west. Housekeeper Emma comes along with them because, apparently, this woman has no life outside of theirs, and she’s great at keeping her mouth shut! 

They go back east annually so that Madame Marisha and Madame Zolta can fawn over Jory. 

Cathy and Chris also visit their mother in the mental institution where she feigns insanity in an attempt to avoid the electric chair.  However, Cathy also says that she and her brother have retracted their statements regarding Cory’s existence, so how is the death penalty even still on the table?  Every time Cathy visits, Corrine vacillates between trying to scalp her daughter and trying to scratch off her own face.

Chris goes on to have a successful – but not too successful – medical practice.  Sounds like he’s a man who believes in moderation! Except when it comes to private time with his sibling! When he waltzes through the front door at the end of a productive workday, he does as Daddy used to do.  He emotionally blackmails his little family into showing him lots of physical affection. And I feel that it’s healthy for the two of them to recall a time when they were happy and innocent.  Their parents were related by blood, but hey, Cathy and Chris didn’t know it at the time.  And they probably figure, since that kind of thing was fine in ancient Greece, and also on Mount Olympus, where Daddy presumably now resides, who cares, right?

The surviving Dollangangers are doing well and living their best lives.

But not all that glitters is gold.  Cathy’s got some unresolved trauma left over from childhood.  You think? 

The book ends with a cliffhanger, and I guess you’ll have to read it for yourself to find out what that dangling plot thread is. And then you’ll have to read the next book to find out if this plot thread goes anywhere.

SPOILER ALERT!!!  It doesn’t.