Most helpful customer reviews
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Just Plain Awful, April 29 2006
By A Customer
First let me say that I am a big V.C. Andrews fan; I love "Flowers in the Attic", "Petals on the Wind", "Heaven" and "Dark Angel" with a passion. I found this book to be incredibly insulting. The destruction of the characters Heaven, Logan, Fanny, and Tony that got started in "Fallen Hearts" continues here; the first 2 are shells of themselves, the latter are caricatures. What the GW did to Tony Tatterton in particular disgusted me; initially he was a fascinating, complex, powerful character--here he is a weak, crazy, old man. The hackneyed phrasing found on every page of this book is truly laughable. The dialogue between Annie and Luke (yet another brother and sister who fall in love--I really don't get the GW's obsession with that)is especially nauseating (i.e. "Or maybe [Farthinggale Manor] becomes whatever you want it to become...If I want it to be made of sugar and maple, it will be." Yuck. This is an 18 year old GUY saying this, by the way!) Why a man was hired to write books from a teenage girl's perspective, I will never know. This book, along with "Fallen Hearts", "Web of Dreams" (the other 2 pieces of garbage that ruined this series) and every other ghostwritten book published afterwards is not for fans of the REAL V. C. Andrews like me.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
The ghostwriter's laughable first attempt, Jul 30 2003
I have two problems with this book. The first one is that the ghost writer did not use one single line of original dialogue throughout the entire story. He just rehashed the whole plot with Heaven again. If you read Fallen Hearts, you won't miss anything in this book. All the elements are there, and back again. Annie dies her hair blond, hmm....Somebody decides to go for a midnight walk and ends up in someone else's bed in the middle of the night. Sound familar? Tony completed deteoriated, the ghostwriter didn't even get the color of his hair right. And, he wasn't the strong, dangerous and intriguing character from the first book, he became a cookie cutter villian that spouted whole lines of dialogue from the previous books back at Annie when he was having a "moment". The ghostwriter blames this on senility. That sounds like an easy way out. The second thing is, as numerous other reviewers have pointed out, Annie is the most moronic, whiny, little fool. I guess Heaven and Logan really messed up there. I personally didn't care about what happened to her, especially since the same things from every other book VC wrote were just transferred onto her simpering, crybaby little head. What a horrible end to a genuinely touching series. This is one of the few VC Andrews books I never reread back when I was really gung ho for all these books. This is also the ghostwriter's ghastly debut. The good news is that he gets better. It would be hard to outdo this book with it's pure lack of everything. With this book, he could have just handed you a piece of paper directing you to the various pages numbers of previous VC Andrews books that he directly ripped off, instead of wasting more paper. A six year old with mad libs and a list of adjectives could have been more creative. But to give him credit, like I said, he does do better in some of his later series. So anyway, you probably don't want to buy this book. Get it in the library, before you go on a long plane ride.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Too Much Happening at Once, Jul 15 2003
Annie had a cruel blow when her mom Heaven and her "dad" Logan died. It was worse when she discovered she couldn't walk. It hadn't helped matters that the nurse assigned to her was apathetic. To top it all off, Tony isolated her from Luke Jr. and everybody else in her life. I was glad when Annie met her birth dad Troy. It was quite a shock for Annie that Tony by mistake thought that she was Leigh. In a way Leigh was practically with Annie in spirit.
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