Review: Capturing Angels by VC Andrews

It is a sad day when you can sum up a book by one of your favourite authors with one word and that word should happen to be boring. Unfortunately, this is exactly how I would describe Capturing Angels by V.C. Andrews. Gone is the gothic romance and fractured fairytales that made the name V.C. Andrews a worldwide phenomenon and in its place is a short, mediocre and poorly researched tale of a little girl who is abducted by a religious fanatic who believes that she has special qualities.

Told from the perspective of Grace, a thirty-something wife of a religious zealot, the novel opens with the abduction of Mary, her five year old daughter, before turning to focus on the problems with Grace's marriage, her affair with a police officer and the eventual discovery of who abducted Mary and why. Unlike novels by the original V.C. Andrews, there is nothing terribly groundbreaking or shocking about this story, but for a few plot holes. I find it incredible that the police did not interview Margaret, a close family friend, immediately after Mary's abduction, for example. Of course, its worth noting that this novel was not actually written by V.C. Andrews, but Andrew Neiderman, a popular horror writer whose novels are often a hit-or-miss affair (Pin and The Devil's Advocate are both hits for example, Sister, Sister and Someone's Watching are misses.) As previously discussed on this blog, VC Andrews wrote just a few novels before she died, while more than sixty have been written by Neiderman. Personally, I think that it was high time V.C. Andrews name was retired or a new ghostwriter with a new perspective was found, but that is just my humble opinion.

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