One Thousand Words

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

If you are a fan of V. C. Andrews you should go away right now and not read this post, because you will just get angry and curse at me and pray for someone to push me down the stairs, which is what happens to mother figures and, as I have a child, I am a mother figure.

I finished reading My Sweet Audrina and it is basically the worst book I have ever finished reading. Reading it was like gaping open-mawed at an accident site. How bad could this be?, I’d ask myself. Surely she won’t… oh. Oh, she did. Oh, I… I see. Well then.

This is a very trope-y book, jammed full of a lot of V. C. Andrews’ themes like:

Utterly terrible, selfish abusive INSANE (and I mean that clinically, not just as a disparaging word) parents!
Who do everything they can to prevent the main character(s) from growing up!
Selfish, lazy, spoiled mothers!
Evil, greedy, bordering-on-sexually-exploiting-their-daughters but isn’t it cuuuuuuute fathers!
Death by childbirth!
Messy clotty complete miscarriages that take place in only a minute or two!
Women are dirty whores! DIRTY WHORES I SAY!
Men are pigs though. PIGS I SAY!
Rape is hot. So totally hot. When a woman says no, she means “throw me down and rape me hard.” Possibly because she’s secretly a whore. WHORE!
Everyone is breathtakingly beautiful. EVERYONE.
Blond hair is totally fetishized, and people with dark hair are EVIL.
What the fuck is going on here what is this I mean really.

My Sweet Audrina doesn’t seem to have any overt incest in it, although the father is REALLY REALLY REALLY concerned about his daughters’ sex lives and wants the aforementioned Audrina to LOVE ONLY HIM. ONLY HIM. EVER. SHE MUST LOVE HIM UNCONDITIONALLY, ALWAYS. That is healthy and normal, right? Also, it’s healthy and normal to dress a 9 year old girl in white silk underpants, right? For her birthday? TOTALLY, MAN. And her love interest as she gets older is worried that she’ll see him as a brother and not a lover. Oh, and her half-sister/cousin masturbates in front of her. Other than that: no incest.

Basically, when Audrina was 9 years old, she took a shortcut through the woods on her way home to her birthday party. Her half-sister/cousin Vera recruited a group of boys about her own age to gang rape her. Because, you know, this is a very common thing that happens to affluent White 9 year old girls, right? Her mom freaks out, scrubs her in the bath tub so hard her skin starts peeling off, and then her dad comes home and she runs up into the tallest room (well, cupola) in the house to throw herself out a window. 9 year old girls! They are just so overly dramatic and prone to suicide! They take Audrina in for ECT and then decide to take matters into their own hands. What do they do, one might ask!

Why, hypnotize her until she thinks she’s 7, tell her that she had an older sister also named Audrina who died mysteriously in the woods (and so she must never, ever go there), fuck with her time sense, have her age 2 years in the course of a few weeks so she thinks she’s 9 again, and change the subject any time she wonders why she can’t remember anything.

THAT IS TOTALLY RATIONAL, YES.

She ends up being BFFs with Arden, who totally was there when she was set upon and raped, and who ran off. Of COURSE he, being 11, has the hots for her, a 9 year old who was raped and then mentally fucked with (one might even say mentally raped!) by her parents/family. Again, TOTALLY RATIONAL. Also his mom has no legs.

Audrina’s dad beats her mom, beats her aunt, and beats her half-sister/cousin (she’s presented as a cousin, they pretend she’s Audrina’s sister to prevent tongues-a-waggin’ about her whorish mom who had her out of wedlock, but in a completely unsurprising twist it’s revealed that OMG she’s Audrina’s half sister DUN DUN DUN). Vera, the half-sister/cousin has brittle bones for some reason, and breaks them CONSTANTLY, usually while in another room near her dad. Nobody questions the constantly broken bones. Granted, the book is set in ~~THE PASTS~~ but seriously. Come on. Anyway, one of her legs is shorter than the other as a result of this, and she has a limp. This brings the Characters With Physical Deformities (But Who Are Still Incredibly Good Looking) to 2.

Audrina’s mom gets pregnant and dies in childbirth, and the resulting child is (of course!) incredibly gorgeous and is also “retarded” but apparently she’s faking just how delayed she is. Despite being told that she will never learn to feed herself, be potty trained, talk, etc. Audrina manages to teach her all these things to a degree because she is FULL OF LOVE.

YOU GUYS.

SHE IS SO FULL OF LOVE.

THAT IS THE REASON HER DAD FUCKED WITH HER HEAD AND LIED TO HER: SO SHE WOULD ALWAYS LOVE HIM.

Audrina and Arden date very chastely and get married when he graduates college and she braces herself and forces herself to let him fuck her and he has NO IDEA why someone who was raped (when she was 9) (who doesn’t realize she was raped, but internalized a lot of bad feelings about physical contact) would not want to have sex but SHE OWES HIM SEX and if she doesn’t sex him HE WILL LEAVE HER FOR VERA, who he totes doesn’t love but man, she sexes him up, and it’s not a PURE LOVE like he and Audrina have but SEX MAN HE NEEDS IT.

At one point she falls into a coma.

Every single mother figure she has dies/is killed (two of them by falling/being pushed down stairs).

She has some kind of psychic bond with her mentally and physically delayed sister.

Arden rapes has exciting sexy sex with her in the pouring rain in a muddy graveyard and that’s just so sexy, y’all! hooray! No means yes! When a woman’s sobbing and crying and beating at your chest and trying to claw your eyes out, that means MORE!

This book is just a train wreck.

It’s clunkily written and I swear, V. C. Andrews never actually had a conversation with anyone nor overheard people talking. There’s not so much dialogue as there is chunks of exposition shoved into peoples’ mouths. Characters, except for Billie (who drops her “g”s and gives down home folksy speeches about crap), have absolutely no voice. Not only are they interchangeable with each other, they sound exactly the same as other characters from other books.

The book SOUNDS promising, you know? There’s this girl! She had an older sister who died mysteriously! Her dad seems to want to remake her into the older sister, who he loved best of all! There is a big family mystery that nobody talks about! There are gaping holes in her memory! What is going on? But the mystery is hilariously awful, as are most big plot elements (Vera sneaks around pushing people down stairs like it’s going out of style, mainly) and the writing is just nowhere near good enough to save it.

I really wish this had been made into a movie.