TN Read-Along #3 Discussion Thread: My Sweet Audrina
“I don’t have any legs — that’s what!” shrieked Billie.
I would crack a joke here about spoiler warnings, but it’s a hallmark of My Sweet Audrina that, by the time any twist or dark secret is revealed in the text, the reader has either figured it out 70 pages ago, or lost interest completely. Either way, it’s an anticlimax each time; I had completely forgotten former figure-skating champion turned double amputee turned Audrina’s mother-in-law-slash-sexual-stepmother Billie Lowe, but the character sketch is so mercilessly saccharine, the foreshadowing so graceless (yet opaque), and the subplot so irrelevant that, by the time Audrina began to say things like, “Hey, I wonder what’s with THE SUPER-LONG DRESSES BILLIE IS WEARING,” I could not have cared less. In any other book, I might criticize the soapily abrupt “I don’t have any legs — that’s what!” Here, I was just glad that someone had finally arrived at the goddamn point, no matter how cloddishly.
The entire book is like that. Andrews is trying for creepy, but much of it is unintentional (in no other writer’s work do young women spend so much time spying on blood relatives Doing It), and several times I wondered whether I had forgotten yet another twist, namely that Audrina’s original desecration in the woods had taken place at the hands of her own father. One mention of a parent’s full lips is probably about six too many as it is; no need to subject us to those full lips mashing down on the thin, joyless lips of YOUR AUNT, or raining kisses on your SEVEN-YEAR-OLD FACE BECAUSE YUCK.
I also don’t understand the ending. I understand the twist, although upon rereading it I felt like I must have forgotten something else, some other horror, that would have made nearly 400 pages of lead-up worthwhile, like, yeah yeah, the First Best Audrina is you, and…? But then Audrina finally grows a backbone, tells everyone in the house, “Hey: gross,” and is getting ready to peace out, but then Sylvia the possibly-not-delayed-after-all sister…brain-locks her into staying? Because otherwise Sylvia will kill them all with her prisms? Because it is her density?
I’ve seen it done before, the last-two-pages awwww SHIT ending. Tom Tryon has a doozy in his catalog. (At least, it seemed like it 25 years ago.) This is not that. Andrews tries for a Tryonic or Faulknerian “you can’t escape the thrall of Whitefern” thing, but it’s not ambiguous in a compelling way; it’s just confusing.
Then again, Audrina processes Arden’s accessory-after-the-facting of her rape by having animalistic sex with him like five times in the rain on an empty grave (“…as you do”), so scoring high on the relatability index is clearly not a priority here.
Tags: books the fuck? The TN Read-Along Tom Tryon V.C. Andrews
And they always say the whole thing! “The Golden Raintree!” they never just say “tree”, or “raintree”, it’s always The Golden Raintree, like it’s some kind of heavenly bistro or some such. Whitefern girls are so extra special they’re even horribly violated in special perfect places!
And you know they’d say it so you can Hear The Capital Letters. Gah, straight out of junior high poetry.
Juuuuust close enough to “golden showers,” but without quiiiiite going there.
And there goes my lunch. Possibly dinner and tomorrow breakfast as well.
If I was VC Andrew’s father and read this, I would be giving her epic stink eyes, constantly and forever.
I wonder what her parents thought of her writing. Well, “writing.” I mean, you have to separate the artist from the art somehow, but I’d have a hard time not being all “is this because we didn’t buy you that pony or something?”
If I was VC Andrew’s father and read this, I would be giving her epic stink eyes, constantly and forever.
I get the feeling based on the oogalicious familial-sex voyeurism that perhaps epic stink eyes is not what Andrews’s father was giving her, if you know what I mean.
(…Sorry.)
….aaaaaaannnd now I have the indelible image of VC, hair in a perfect bun, shrieking “YES, YES, IT WAS THE PONY!!!!” at her befuddled parents before running off to play paper dolls in the attic and flash prisms in people’s eyes.
I’m still reading the book. It’s actually comforting to read it now and realize it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I first read it when I was 14 or 15, and when I had trouble following the plot I thought it was some kind of failure on my part. Now I know it’s not me, it’s VC!
“… it’s not me, it’s VC!”
I think the Nation could make this catch on. Who’s with me?
“…it’s not me, it’s VC!”
Yep,I’m there with bells on.
I first read this when I was 13 because everyone was raving about the VC Andrew’s books. “My Sweet Audrina” was the first one I read and my god, like Blair, I thought there was something very wrong with me because I just couldn’t follow the plot. Because I couldn’t do that,it seemed to magnify the content of the book to the point where it seriously disturbed me. I then read the Dollanger books and the first three of the Casteel series because I thought I would finally ‘get it’. I stopped because the books were really upsetting me which made me feel even more stupid about myself at the time. I think what added to my distressed feelings about VC Andrews work is that my peergroup at the time were really enamoured by these books. I thought I was such a weirdo freak for not getting whatever it was that made girls moony over these books.
Until now. Thankyou everyone for putting this on the read-a-long. I am now supremely comforted that I didn’t ‘get this’ at all. If everyone had been reading it (like the TNers!) in a way of ‘how bad can this get?’ hilarity, it would have been fun.
But I’ve realised the thing that has disturbed me most about VC Andrews is the way she writes. Her prose comes off like a poor man’s Enid Blyton. It reads like you are going to enter into the world of jam and teacakes and wondrous adventures. Which makes what goes on in this perverse world all the more horrid. We don’t get the magic Faraway Tree, we get the fricking Golden Sho…err,I mean, Raintree. Her prose reads as though there really is anything wrong with a nine year old girl being pack raped by equally young boys. And that a young girl orchestrated it. And then all the wondrous abusive,weirdass cult brainwashing that followed afterwards by dearest Papa. Because VC Andrews believs this is just a thrilling adventure, just like the Famous Five don’t you know?
And while Papa didn’t sleep with Audrina (I kinda feel he might as well have, seriously) I shuddered when I read the bit where he felt his sensitive girl would be “a saviour to all mankind” which is why all the rocking chair sessions were necessary.
In amongst ALl the crap that goes on, Audrina just rolls with it. Like all of VC Andrews ‘heroines’. Because a part of Audrina’s beauty and specialness is that she ‘understands’ why men do these things. Because a truly beautiful women understands these things unlike all the other women in the book, Vera, Ellsbeth, Billie-even Sylvia.
To me, like the other VC Andrews books, its as thought the author is implying that Audrina and her other ‘heroines’ are just so special and beautiful and gifted (to the point where someone like Audrina has chameleon hair, my golly goodness!) that these kind of girls are up for the sexually violent treatment she doles out to them. They are either raped or a candidate for incest. It’s as though VC Andrews is saying that you aren’t really special etc unless your uncle, brother, stepfather wants to sleep with you or boys/men want to rape you. If these things don’t happen to you, you are just deluding yourself thinking you are a true beauty or a real woman.
What sort of whacked out s**t does this teach young girls? Ick.
Sorry for the length but I feel I’m exorcising a ghost-finally! I was ruthlessly made fun of my lack of VC Andrews love all that time ago. This traumatised 13 year old girl is now free. And I ain’t going back to the house. Let prism girl burn the f**ker to the ground with all its inhabitants.
It does make me wonder whether overexposure to VC Andrews is why so many modern comics writers think that the only valid motivation for female characters is rape.
…or maybe VC Andrews and modern comics writers are just tapping into the same vein of stupid.
The above comment should have had @ferretrick at the top
I would love it if the next “Earth’s Children” book by Auel was the next TN book club book. Of course it will probably be 1500 pages long.
I started reading “The Clan of The Cave Bear” at a relative’s house when I was 11. They gave it to me to take home and finish reading, along with the next 2 in the series. I have to say, I learned much more from “The Valley of Horses” and “The Mammoth Hunters” than sex ed.
BTW, Ayla also invented the needle and the spear-thrower, which is an actual ancient weapon, it turns out.
So, Arden was an asshole. I read a lot of VC back in the day, and I don’t think she had a single male hero who didn’t think with his dick. That’s even the good guys. Of all the craziness in the book, I think their relationship is supposed to be the one normal, if troubled, thing. It misses the mark entirely. The fact that Audrina stayed with Arden after he cheated on her over the entire course of her relationship, including when they were teenagers and when she was in a COMA (having sex right in front of her bed?!) makes her the wimpiest “heroine” in the history of the universe. Even though there are a million things wrong with this book, I have to feel sorry for Audrina. There is no possibility for a happy ending for her. In a family that dysfunctional I suspect her fate would have been similar even without the Golden Raintree and all that follows.
The author bio in the back of my copy of the book said that VC lived with her mother in Virgina. She died in her 60s and, I believe, never married. Reading the sex scenes in this book make me think that she never had sex, or if she did it was never consensual. Even the hot, sex-ay, “I’m giving into my passion” scenes were quite violent given the situation. At the beginning of the scene that led to grave!sex, Audrina was having a fantasy that Arden was one of the kids who raped her. She hit him, clawed him, bit him, etc. until she was exhausted and that turned into sex (and multiple orgasms, of course!). I remember reading VC Andrews books when I was a kid, before I’d had sex myself, and while I don’t think I thought they were REALISTIC, I didn’t realize just how insanely OTT they were. (I was probably too distracted by the fact that the people having sex were usually some gross bro-sis-cousin combo to worry about the sex itself.) Now I think, “This seems like sex as imagined by someone who has never had sex.”
I wanted to record some of the “best” dialogue here in the comments, but I’ve already put my book in the pile to send to GoodWill and I’m not sure if I will get around to digging it back out. We’ll see.
” I have to say, I learned much more from “The Valley of Horses” and “The Mammoth Hunters” than sex ed. ”
Yeah, me too. “Sex ed” was mostly a list of all the awful diseases you can catch with your dick and how every major figure in history had congenital syphilis. Most of my education in the actual mechanics of sex were “Earth’s Children” and a back issue of “Penthouse” that I found in my parents’ bedside table drawer.
“BTW, Ayla also invented the needle and the spear-thrower, which is an actual ancient weapon, it turns out.”
Actually, I think her boyfriend invented the spear-thrower, which A: of course it was the man who invented the vicious weapon designed only for killing things, and B: oh god WHY IS THERE SPACE IN MY BRAIN DEVOTED TO REMEMBERING MINOR PLOT POINTS FROM THE “EARTH’S CHILDREN” SERIES?
Just saying that I have enjoyed this discussion immensely, even though I haven’t participated. I read the Flowers series repeatedly in my teens (heck, even my brother did that!), but read Audrina as an adult just a few years ago. I thought that was the reason it didn’t make sense – plot logic is not as necessary for a teenager as long as there is enough smut – but apparently not:-)