Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Flowers in the Attic. A Book Review

A girl who was a couple of years younger than I was reading “Flowers in the Attic,” by V.C. Andrews when I was in high school, back in 1979. I asked her what it was about and without hesitation she said, “Evil.”

People read more back then. Young people read a lot more. I never picked the book up but always wondered why she would have that reaction. Last week, I finally ordered the book from Amazon and sat down with it. I finished it last night, reading far past my bedtime, and putting it down only after I finished. I miss that.

The story begins with a happy family of four, an older boy, his sister, and twins, a boy and a girl.

The mother takes the kids to her mother and father’s home (no, I will not tell you why) and the children have to hide from their grandfather (I won’t tell you why, stop it) and so begins the story of the children living upstairs and in the attic.

Told from the older girl’s point of view, the reader follows what happens, mentally and physically to the children as they are promised they have to hide for only a day, to only a few more days, and finally, seasons change.

Nearly the entire novel is centered in one room and the attic. Nearly four hundred pages are written about four people in two rooms. Andrews pulls this off deftly.

To call this a horror story isn’t accurate. To describe it as a coming of age book is obscene. To say there is joy to be found in the book isn’t precise, yet with all that happens to the characters, they do survive, in a manner of speaking.

Will the book leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling?

No.

Will the reader put the book down and be happy about having read the book?

Also no.

Is there any redeeming value in the story at all?

I think so. But not in any sense most people aware exists. Survival at any cost is a dangerous path for a writer. How close to the edge are you willing to drag the reader? How far is too far? How much is too much?

You get to decide that as a writer, and a reader.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Starfield

The stars are brighter without the moon in the sky, Mars and Venus burn like a signal fire in the moonless night, and it seems oddly more quiet. The last week or so fog has lifted after three in the morning, slowly, but building up to challenge the sunrise and to confound those of us on the road before the sun.
Years ago, I nearly rammed a truck in the fog, on a back ass county road, a white truck with no taillights, the rear of the truck loaded down with cattle feed, poking along slowly in the fog before dawn, and all I could do was go around him, in the dark, in the fog, and the sensation of imminent Death overwhelmed me as I whipped around him and back into the lane. Springfield Georgia (not the one in North Georgia) is nothing more than a crossroads only locals know about. To die there, hitting all those bags of feed, in the dark and the fog would have been odd.
I go out into the yard and listen, look up at the sky, and I wonder how many people do this, stop before dawn to see the Universe in the dark, every star a sun, every sun perhaps with planets, each planet maybe home to lives and souls like our own, or perhaps strangely unlike anything we can comprehend, living billions of miles away, living lives we cannot grok at all, and they might think the same thoughts.
A faint star, as tiny as Springfield is, as forgotten as they day in the fog by everyone but me and the driver of the truck, might have in its orbit a being writing about a day only two beings remember, and perhaps they are writing at this very improbable moment.
Come back to Earth, and now look up at a sky where someone a mile away might be watching the same stars. Maybe in the next town, or even next door. We have created in those people aliens, and we do not speak to our own kind, while dreaming of what those on other worlds are like.
Take Care,
Mike