LOVE IT! I loved the book, i think its my favorite after FITA...a lot of suffering, love, survival....i loved it! I will suggest it to anyone.
Really Great! I first read this book about fifteen years ago when I was thirteen, and it is really a wonderful read. Despite the bad reputation popular fiction like this often gets, I think it was a feeling portrayal of the deep poverty that still plagues some areas of West Virginia, and the social discrimination suffered by those who experience it. And yes, of course, being a V.C. Andrews book there is a beautiful adolescent heroine who does not know her "real" identity. In this case, a girl whose rich Boston mother fled to the woods of West Virginia, married a Casteel (called hill-scum by the neighbors), only to die tragically giving birth to her (at the frighteningly young age of 14).
Heaven, the heroine of the book, lives with this shadow of her mother over her head. Her brothers and sisters have a different mother, and her father resents her, apparently because she "killed" her mother. However, she manages to find meaning in life through her love for school, her siblings and her kindly grandparents, despite the grinding and humiliating poverty she must face every day. Eventually, things get really crazy,and she is separated from her family and forced to live in an insane foster home with an evil redhaired foster mother (although I love V.C.'s books, I must mention that her anti-redhead discrimination is quite apparent in many of her books and I don't like it!)
It's a really fun and engrossing read and you'll love it, and it's oddly moving. I still remember how much I cried when Heaven was separated from Our Jane and Keith. And you must read the sequel, unlike Flowers in the Attic the story really needs Dark Angel to be completed.Oh, woe is me. A first person pity party for a girl who was raised in the hills of West Virginia by her father, stepmother, and grandparents. She lives with her 4 brothers and sisters -- Tom, Fanny, Jane and Keith, whom she later learns are really her half brother and sisters, because they don't share the same mother. The romance with Logan is cute, but so pretentious. The time gaps in this book were a bit "blah", but were dealable. Excellent character development (which is characteristic of a V C Andrews novel), almost no plot (but many scattered sub-plots that were hard to follow) and a ton of self-pity. Heaven is likeable, but highly annoying near the end of the book. There is just something about a woman who is supposed to be strong willed be so fickle and weak minded. It also just doesn't conjure the emotion that Cathy did in the Dollanganger series, but it sure as hell is a lot better than all the crap that her ghost writer has written. A good read, overall.
