Review: Shattered Memories by VC Andrews

After being abducted by a creep and discovering that the whole thing was a set up by her jealous and utterly insane twin sister, Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald is at home and trying to make sense of what just happened to her in Shattered Memories, the third novel in the Mirror Sisters Series, written by VCA ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman. With both her mother and twin sister in a mental health facility, Kaylee must adapt to life in the outside world. And the whole thing is utterly dull. Readers are sent down the usual path of a VCA novel, in which Kaylee starts at a new school where no one knows her, she doesn't make many friends but she does get to hook up with a new bloke and learns to stand up for herself. And, of course, a few odd things happen every now and again, you know just to remind readers that these books are supposed to be shocking. Though, quite frankly, I'd be a whole lot more shocked at this point if someone, anyone, actually did something truly interesting. (And no, what happens in that tacked on epilogue does not count.) There are also numerous dated references to pop culture and fashion.

This one is standard VCA fare. Kaylee more or less recovers, the nutty relatives make a brief return for the sake of doing nutty things and the whole thing goes out with a whimper rather than a bang. It's probably a little bit less disturbing than the other two titles in the series, but by no means is this a well crafted or well plotted book.

Not recommended.

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