I'm replacing Red Roses Mean Love by Jacqui D'Allesandro for the book with a plant in it pick for my What's in a Name challenge. I admit it, I read this book just to be scandalized by the taboo topics it deals with.  I've wanted to read it for a while, but they never had it at my bookstore.  Finally they got in a copy of it and I scooped it up.  Golly, I wish I hadn't.  

Summary
Set in the fifties and told from the point of view of the oldest girl, Cathy, Flowers in the Attic is about the Dollanganger family- loving father and mother, brother, sister, and baby twins, good house, good neighborhood--a perfect and perfectly normal family.  Then the dad is killed, and the truth comes out--the family is drowning in debt because the mom couldn't curb her spending habits and the dad didn't have a backbone.  So Mom writes to her filthy rich parents, who disowned her years ago for some unknown reason.  The grandmother agrees to let her and the kids live at their palatial house, but only if the existence of the kids is kept secret from the dying grandfather.  Greedy for money, the mother agrees.  The kids are locked in a small room attached to an attic.  At first, they think they will only be there for a little while, but days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years with Mom's visits becoming less and less frequent and the grandmother's visits becoming more and more vicious.  Chris and Cathy, the two oldest, try to keep the twins occupied and happy trapped in that attic, but they must deal with their own restlessness and blossoming sexuality.  In the end, the kids must cope with tragedy and ultimate betrayal.  

Opinion
I struggled through this book.  The prose is stilted and laborious.  The pace is slow, and the truly horrific parts of this throwback to Gothic horror are slogged down by the inexpert writing.  Aside from that, though, the scandalous parts of this book--the sex and incest--made me feel kind of dirty, tainted, for reading them.  I don't mind being scandalized, but the book is written without an ounce of irony, making the taboo parts too real and too serious for me to be comfortable with.  I think that the idea of growing up and going through puberty in a confined space with no contact with the outside world could have been an interesting topic to explore if the author did not have the intent to shock, but only the earnest intent to figure out what would happen, or the intent to scandalize with a wink and with tongue planted firmly in cheek (to borrow a phrase overused by Nora Roberts).  V.C. Andrews seems to have neither intent, or, if she did, she didn't handle it well, I don't think.

Just as a side note, I went on Wikipedia and read the summaries for the rest of the Dollanganger series (actually written by V.C. Andrews herself, and not others writing under her name after her death), and the saga just gets sicker.  

All in all, I give it a 2 out of 10 for personal enjoyment and a 2 out of 10 for actual quality.

Up next: Just the Way You Are

So I've joined the My Year of Reading Dangerously challenge.  This is going to be great!  I'll get to read books I've been meaning to read but never really get around to.
  

Here's my list:

January: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens- I've read almost a half of this for school, but I never did finish.
February: Beloved, by Toni Morrison- This is also a school book that I have to read
March: Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut- I've owned this book forever, but have never been able to pick it up even though several of my friends are Vonnegut fangirls.
April: The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier- somehow I missed this one when I was a kid.
May: Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro- I have avoided and avoided reading this, but now I'm going to get through it. 
June: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
July:  Ulysses, James Joyce- I read most of this last year in school, but I read it quickly and with little comprehension, so I'd like to try it again.
August: Forgetfulness: A Novel, Michael Mejia- by a professor of mine.  It's supposed to be pretty difficult.
September: Selected Poems, W. H. Auden- all poetry is difficult for me.
October: Gentlemen and Players: A Novel, Joanne Harris- I don't know if this is a difficult book, but it's certainly breaking out of the mold for me
November: A Month of Classic Short Stories, Various
December: The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

Wow. I didn't realize I'd find a challenge I liked so quickly.  I found this one here, and here's my list:

1. A book with a color in its title: FOREVER IN BLUE-Ann Brashares
2. A book with an animal in its title: A COMPANY OF SWANS- Eva Ibbotson*
3. A book with a first name in its title: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS- Gertrude Stein
4. A book with a place in its title: BIG SUR- Jack Kerouac
5. A book with a weather event in its title: KISSING SNOWFLAKES- Abby Sher,* THE SUN ALSO RISES, Ernest Hemingway
6. A book with a plant in its title: FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC- V.C. Andrews

I've got all of 2008 to complete these.  The Stein, Kerouac, and Hemingway ones I have to read for school anyway, so I'm sure those will get done, and the other three are young adult or romance (or both!), so those shouldn't be hard either.