Review: Forbidden Sister by VC Andrews

The release of a new VC Andrews novel is an exciting time. For diehard fans like me, there is always that tiny spark of hope that finally, this will be the novel that lives up to the legacy created by the original author, despite the number of disappointing releases that have flooded our shelves for the past few years. Capturing Angels, Into the Darkness, Cloudburst, Daughter of Darkness, the two novel Heavenstone series ... 

Fortunately, Forbidden Sister is not another disappointment. Set in New York, Forbidden Sister tells the story of Emmie, a fifteen-year-old from a strict family. Emmie has an older sister, Roxy, who she is forbidden to speak about since her father cast her out of their home. When Emmie learns that Roxy is living nearby and working as a high class call girl she cannot resist learning more about her older sister.

While by no means perfect, I found Forbidden Sister to be one of the most enjoyable V.C. Andrews novels I have read since Into the Garden was released in the late 1990s. For once, the novel contained a female lead I actually cared about, instead of simply wondering how she could be so stupid over and over. Of course, there were plenty of flaws--the deaths of each of the Wilcox parents seemed to be a bit too convenient for the plot and I would have liked to have seen some conflict or some kind of meeting between Roxy and her father before he died--just as I would have liked to have seen Emmie stand up to her father. I found the mother to be a rather spineless character and I think that she could have tried harder to contact her long-lost daughter. Oh and there was some dud boyfriend who eventually revealed himself to be a complete douche bag, but I found him to be more of a distraction to an otherwise interesting plot.

Overall, this one was an enjoyable enough read for a public holiday weekend (yes, in Adelaide we really do have a public holiday today for a horse race,) and remains the best VC Andrews release in recent years. And once again, Mr Neiderman, I love the fact that you slipped a "No worries" in there.

Here's hoping that the sequel, Roxy's Story is just as enjoyable if not better.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more