My Sweet Audrina is about a sheltered young girl with extremely overprotective parents. She is told that her younger sister (“the first Audrina”) was killed after wandering into the woods alone. The novel follows her through adolescence and tells of her life amongst her dysfunctional and abusive family.

This was my second V.C. Andrews book, the first being Flowers in the Attic. I’m not sure what took me so long to finally read this, but I’m thrilled that I finally did. V.C. Andrews gets a bad rap for being ‘trashy lit’ but I really feel that she was a deeply talented woman who excelled at weaving an eloquent spider web of a plot. Her subject matter isn’t high brow “literature”, and is often pretty camp, but something about her characters is compelling and realistic; perhaps it’s their inevitable, frighteningly realistic hardships.

The atmosphere of this novel was incredible. It was like a fairy tale mixed with pure gothic romance (not “romance”), that set the mood to be perfectly dreary, despairing and spooky. One of my favorite things about Andrews’ stories is that she employs horror outside of the supernatural. Instead, what makes her books horrific are complex, toxic and decaying family relationships which set events into motion.

I deeply enjoyed the characterization, especially of Vera, who was awfully and fantastically cruel - in the vein of an evil stepsister from a fairy tale. I would have loved to learn more about her background and how she had come to be this way. I found the dialogue and each plot point consistently compelling and always purposeful.