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The long-awaited sequel to My Sweet Audrina, one of V.C. Andrews’s strangest, most beloved books—and now a Lifetime movie! Whitefern swallowed Audrina’s childhood—and now the sprawling Victorian mansion threatens her adult life too…Audrina remembers a better time, when her husband, Arden, was a young man with a heart filled with devotion for her. He didn’t used to be this ambitious, expansive…this cruel. But then, the death of Audina’s father changed a great many things. When the reading of her father’s will reveals that Audrina herself will control fifty-one percent of the family brokerage—the halls of Whitefern again don’t feel safe. Arden’s protestations become frantic, nearly violent. And while Audrina didn’t anticipate running the family business, she’s curious to do so. And she can’t help but wonder what had made her father change his will at the last minute? What did he know about Arden that she didn’t? Trapped in the middle of it all: her fragile, simple sister—the beautiful, trusting Sylvia. Audrina promised her father she’d watch over the young woman. But after years of relative quiet, the dark days of Whitefern may have returned…
Publication Year: 2016
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0Being a V.C. Andrews junkie in my darker moments, I couldn't quite resist this when I saw it on Netgalley. If you've ever read a V.C. Andrews book (or at least one released under her name), you can probably make a good guess on how reading this went, and you'd be remarkably right in almost everything you guessed. It was compulsively readable, but a bit obvious.
Some of that is due to the fact that I've read quite a few of these books, honestly. However, there's generally at least one shocking bit of a twist that I didn't see coming, and one of my issues with this in particular was that I had everything laid out pretty early on in the story and was just waiting for the twists. I don't know if that says something terrifying about my mind (it may), but a level of experience with the genre is likely to net others the same result.
My Sweet Audrina (to which this is a sequel) was one of the stronger Andrews books, I always felt, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the character arcs taken in this. Of course, you can't have a novel of this type without some character growth (degeneration?) to give you new villains, but I guess I was hoping for more expansion in the cast than I got.
Audrina continues to be much of the same, and sometimes it is rough to read her because of that--she shows signs of fire occasionally, but she's manipulated and blind throughout. Not necessarily a critique of the book, given she's an established character and she hasn't changed, but it did make things harder now that she is older.
Over all I rather enjoyed this, and I'm glad I picked it up. As a heads up to anyone interested, definitely read My Sweet Audrina first if you intend to read it at all--like many sequels, this spoils basically all the twists and plot points of the first, and missing those will be missing quite a bit of the fun.
This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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