Trashy Tuesday – My Sweet Audrina

Yeah, that’s right.  We’re back with another installment from the Queen of Gothic Trash, VC Andrews.  To quote my lovely friend Kate (when she saw what I was reading):  ”Blast from the trashy past. In middle school we passed those around like 60s housewives with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Oh so ridiculous, thank you!”

The truth is that I am usually 2-4 weeks ahead on my Trashy Tuesday reading, but this time I kind of slacked and had to figure out what I was going to write about at the last minute.  Sunday, actually.  I knew I needed a fast – guaranteed trashy – read, so Ms Andrews is kind of the go-to-gal for that.

Audrina Adare is seven years old with  a memory like a sieve.  She lives in a crumbling southern mansion with her parents (Lucky and Damien), her aunt (and her illegitimate cousin) and the memory of the First Audrina.  She’s Audrina #2, her older sister shared the same birthday and was killed on her ninth birthday after not listening to their parents warnings about walking through the woods.  Because the First Audrina was so good and perfect in every way (except for disobeying her parents that one time – a mistake she paid for with her life), our Audrina is constantly forced to sit in her rocking chair, singing so she can let the First Audrina fill her like a pitcher.

Sounds weird, right?  Wait, it gets weirder.

Momma and Aunt Ellsbeth have Tuesday Teatimes every week with Aunt Mercy Marie.  Mercy Marie disappeared several years ago on a mission trip to Africa, and is presumed dead and eaten by cannibals.  Death hasn’t stopped the Whitefern girls from trotting out her photo each week and pretending she’s sitting there having tea and sandwiches with them.  The sisters take turns making voices for Aunt Mercy Marie and use her to say all of the scathing things about each other they wouldn’t say otherwise.  Audrina is forced to sit there with them  and cousin Vera will sneak home from school to watch her mother and aunt drink their bourbon tea, get drunk and spill family secrets.

Vera is…kind of a bitch.  She knows Audrina has a bad memory, so she’s constantly teasing her about things Audrina can’t remember.  She says she knew the First Audrina, and that this new Audrina will obviously never compare.  Vera is described as having apricot coloured hair and “Arab eyes,” which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  But then…Audrina apparently has Chameleon hair and violet eyes (if you didn’t know, VC Andrews women often have violet eyes).

Vera has brittle bones, so she’s home frequently in casts and just lounging around tormenting her little cousin.  Oh, and to save her the shame of being an illegitimate child, Audrina’s parents pretend that she’s their other daughter.

One spring day, Audrina blatantly disobeys the ‘don’t ever go into the woods’ stricture and meets a boy a few years older than her working in the yard of a nearby cottage.  They become fast friends, even though Arden (really, could the foreshadowing be more obvious?) has haunted eyes whenever Audrina talks about how she can’t really remember her childhood.  Arden’s mom is Billie.  Billie is gorgeous (like almost all VC Andrews women are – they’re all beautiful on the outside, anyway), but has secrets of her own.  She was once an Olympic figure skater, but someone left a bobby pin on the ice and she fell and cut herself on a skate blade.  She didn’t heal and was apparently diabetic, so lost her legs to gangrene.  Meg and I figured out who left that pin there, though.  Hint:  it’s the same villain we’ve used for all of these books.

Audrina, Arden and Vera are fishing one day.  Audrina goes behind some bushes to change out of her bathing suit, but discovers that her clothes are missing.  When she turns around to put her bathing suit back on, she sees Vera’s hand grabbing that, too.  Arden offers to give her his shirt, but then discovers that his clothes are also missing.  At that moment, Audrina’s father comes rushing out of the woods to see his naked daughter and a shirtless boy and he FREAKS OUT, starts shaking Arden and yelling about how boys are all the same and they only want one thing and blahblahblah.  He gives Audrina his suit jacket, then takes her home.  On the way, he tells her that there’s a witchy-woman at the house to determine the sex of Audrina’s unborn sibling.  The witch can’t get a read on it, and tells them that what Mrs Adare is carrying is neither male nor female.  Eep.

Even though she doesn’t remember turning 8, one day her father tells her that she’s turning 9 in the morning.  She wakes up to find that her mother has gone into labour early, and that her parents have been at the hospital all night.  Her mother dies during childbirth, and her father does not bring the baby home for almost three years.  During that time, Audrina demands piano lessons and then to get to go to school like a regular girl.  She gets both wishes.

Vera has an affair with the music teacher (and possibly Arden), the day that Papa brings home Sylvia we learn that she is “severely retarded” and that it will be Audrina’s new job to take care of her.  Wait, what?  She’s, like, 12.  You’re going to give the care of a disabled child completely over to someone who is also a child?  Top notch parenting there, dude.

Vera runs off to New York with the music teacher and Aunt Ellsbeth starts sharing Papa’s bed.

Years pass.  Sylvia only likes Audrina and playing with these little glass prisms that Audrina found in the first Audrina’s room.  She’s constantly flashing lights in the eyes of people she doesn’t like.  Aunt Ellsbeth is about to take off to find her daughter in New York, but the morning she’s to leave, Audrina finds her dead at the bottom of the stairs.  Damien decides to make it look like she wasn’t leaving, and Audrina runs off with Sylvia to tell Arden to marry her THAT DAY.

They head off to North Carolina for a quickie ceremony, and on their wedding night, all Audrina can think of are the dreams she’s had of her older sister being violated under a tree.  She starts screaming, but Arden thinks she’s into it.  They head back home a few days later to find that Audrina’s father has moved Arden’s mother into the mansion and that they’re all going to live together as a big happy family.

Vera returns from New York before Thanksgiving and Damien yells at her to leave.  She falls, breaks her leg (again), so has to stay.

Legless Billie takes a tumble down the same stairs, and everyone assumes it was Sylvia who shone light in her eyes to make her fall.  Two people dead at the foot of the stairs, this doesn’t look good for the Adares.

Audrina finds out that because of her frigid ways, Arden has been messing around with Vera.  If she doesn’t start opening up (literally), he’s going to leave her.  Apparently, this is exactly the impetus she needed to arouse her passions, and they get all hot and heavy in the garden.  That night, she hears crying, so she goes to check on Sylvia and is blinded by prisms everywhere, then PUSHED down the stairs.

She wakes up a few weeks later from a coma, to hear Vera trying to convince Arden to pull the plug on her.  Oi.  For a few days, she makes no attempts to let them know she’s awake, just listens to them plotting.  The day she’s to be disconnected, Sylvia puts her on Billie’s little wheeled cart and hauls her off to hide her under the First Audrina’s bed.  Vera gets all ragey, but then everyone else realizes that Audrina #2 will be okay again.  HUZZAH!  But wait, there are still somethings she doesn’t understand.  She starts questioning her father about why she could never remember anything about her past and it comes out that SHE WAS THE FIRST AUDRINA!

Yes, there was never more than one Audrina.  She was gang raped on her ninth birthday, and her mother made her feel so ashamed about it that she was ready to kill herself.  They put her through electroshock therapy to make her forget and then used sly tricks to make her think she was younger than she actually was.  Days would pass and be months to her.  She realizes that Arden was there to witness the entire thing (hence, the haunted eyes), but still doesn’t believe it wasn’t her sister, so she runs down to the cemetery to DIG UP THE BODY and prove it to everyone.  Arden follows her and they fight, then have more steamy sex IN THE GRAVEYARD.  So, guys – in case you were wondering, I figured it out.  The penis is obviously the cause of – and answer to – all of life’s problems.

Oh, and Vera set the whole thing up because she’s actually Damien’s daughter (yeah, he did both sisters) and she was jealous that her daddy didn’t love her enough.  She figured if Audrina got raped, that would be enough for NO ONE TO LOVE HER EVER AGAIN.  Thank god she fell down the stairs and died too, am I right?

Monkeys in Love

Weird search term, but cute picture taken by my husband.

We all have weird ways people find our blogs, right?  And isn’t it kind of a write rite of (blogging) passage that we have to talk about them at some point?

Surprisingly, Clan of the Cave Bear tops the list.  I say surprisingly, since it hasn’t even been a week since that post went up.  Also, many terms related to Flowers in the Attic, the Dollangangers in general (petals wind cathy chris bed hear us, step mother seduce his litler nice [?!], VC Andrews Sucks) and zombie sex, so I guess that Trashy Tuesdays are more popular than I thought they’d be.

George Weasley’s Ear is also popular, in several different incarnations.  My favourite was George Weasley’s Angel Ear.  Not sure what that means, but it makes me giggle.  Also included here are other things I’ve never talked about:  George Weasley’s Son, George Weasley Love Story, George Weasley Wiki and Magic Weasleys.

I’m a big fan of unicorn shark (Meg, draw this for me?  I think I need one!) and anything remotely related to Doctor Who (Christopher Eccleston, Rose Sucks and New Paradigm Daleks).  I feel kind of bad for Sad Blonde Girl Webcam, though.

Most of the terms, I can easily figure out how they ended up here, but a lot still leave me scratching my head.  Step Brother Quotes is a good example.  I don’t think I’ve ever talked about my siblings or that movie?  Coincidentally, the day someone found my blog using this query, we found our copy of Step Brothers…which has been missing since two moves ago!  Maybe google is magic.

I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but my new mantra has to be “I don’t stop when I’m tired, I stop when I’m done.”  Thanks, random googler!

Oh, and the people who use private search kind of suck.  Jerks.

This is another one that I can’t figure out and I don’t even want to type it out.  It’s weird, gross, and has nothing to do with anything I’ve ever posted at all.  Warning to not click unless you have brain bleach handy.

Ps.  Heather – don’t hate me, but two people found me by searching Snape is a Jerk.  Because he is, and you know it.  <.<

Trashy Tuesday – VC Andrews (Dollangangers, part 5)

At last, we’ve arrived at the final installment in the Dollanganger series!  I was talking to Becoming Cliche over chat the other day about how thrilled I was to be able to stop reading VC Andrews, and she said something to the effect of  ”Oh, but Heaven was such a good book!  And what about My Sweet Audrina?”  I guess this means I will be revisiting this author at some point in the future, but hopefully not any time soon.  There’s only so many incestuous relationships a girl can handle at one time, you know?

I think it’s interesting to note here, that this was the first VC Andrews book to be published after her death in 1986.  It seems that it has been questioned as to whether this book was actually written partially by her before she died – and completed by the ghost-writer hired by her estate to continue her “legacy” – or whether the ghost-writer in fact wrote the entire thing himself.  Interesting.  I think I prefer the notion that he composed every future Andrews book with the assistance of a Ouija Board.  It makes things more fun for me.

Amusing, Scientific AND Instructive!

Garden of Shadows takes place before the events detailed in Flowers in the Attic.  It’s the story of the menacing grandmother, Olivia.  Young Olivia is tall and rather plain.  Since she’s not pretty or bubbly or good at much other than math (she does the books for her father’s business), she’s resigned herself to being a lonely old maid.  That all changes the day her father brings Malcolm Foxworth home for dinner.  He is immediately nice to her and compliments her and says all the right things.  They go for a walk after dinner, and he asks her to marry him.  He needs a strong wife that can run his incredibly rich household, he says.  This is obviously a marriage of convenience, but since he’s so dreamy and he’s chosen her, she lets herself think it will grow into something else.  They’re married in a quickie ceremony by a justice of the peace and set off the following day for Virginia and Foxworth Hall.

Her new husband pretty much ignores her on the train south, does not try to engage in any newlywed-type shenanigans, even though she’s hoping (and dreading) that he will.  They arrive at Foxworth Hall and Olivia is given charge of the house.  She’s told she must stay out of Malcolm’s study, and that no one ever goes into the room that belonged to his mother.  We find out that his mother ran off with another man when he was only five.  She was incredibly beautiful, so of course Malcolm is distrustful of beautiful women.  Hence, the plain-jane wifey he brings home.

Olivia makes the house her own, and in doing so causes all of the servants to hate her.  She thinks she has to be stern with everyone, so they talk smack about her behind her back.  She decides that Malcolm could not have possibly have meant that she wasn’t allowed to check out his mother’s room because she’s the woman of the damn house afterall, so she goes snooping.  The room is a shrine to a woman that has been gone for more than 20 years.  All of her strumpety dressing gowns and furs and whatnot are still there, her brush is still on the vanity, etc.  It has this really intriguing “swan bed” that everyone always talks about how it must need custom sheets because the mattress is oval-shaped.  I really have a hard time picturing it as anything other than Mae West’s bed in She Done Him Wrong.

So, one of the servants rats on Olivia and Malcolm comes rushing in to yell at her for being in his shrine mother’s suite, but while he’s in the middle of yelling, he’s overcome with a fit of passion and takes her (her first time) on his mother’s bed…while calling her BY HIS MOTHER’S NAME.  Jeez.  Oedipal complex, anyone?  Ew.  I get squicked out just thinking about it.  He comes to her again a few nights later and forces her again, telling her that he wants a son.

Sure enough, nine months later – a son is born.  They name him Malcolm Jr, but call him Mal to avoid confusing him with his father.  A year or so later, Malcolm visits her in the middle of the night again.  This time he tells her that he wants a daughter.  Olivia has problems giving birth to their second baby (another son, oh noes!) and is told by the doctor that she can not have any more children.  Malcolm is disappointed in her for failing to produce a daughter – especially since their second boy (Joel, remember him from the last book?) is sickly – and their relationship becomes even more strained.

When the children are small, Malcolm receives word that his father will soon be arriving back at the Manor with his lovely young wife.  Olivia is shocked because she did not know his father had re-married, even more shocked when she discovers his wife is only 19.  Garland and Alicia have the kind of marriage Olivia had hoped to have for herself.  They’re constantly sneaking off to get it on, and Olivia listens in on them (and even watches!) quite often.  Gross.  Like, seriously? What the hell is this crap?  It’s made even worse by the fact that it’s obvious Malcolm has his eye on his step-mother and Olivia watches him attempt to seduce her one day down by the river lake.  Olivia doesn’t blame Malcolm for his attempted infidelity, no.  It’s obviously Alicia’s fault for being so pretty and witty and bright.

Alicia becomes pregnant and gives birth to Malcolm’s half-brother, Christopher.  Wait.  Did I just say Christopher?  Why does that name seem so familiar in the context of this series…?  Hmmmm, anyway – on Christopher’s third birthday, Garland walks in on Malcolm while he’s attempting to rape his step-mother.  They have a fight, triangle wins and Garland has a fatal heart attack.

After the death of his father, Malcolm’s ardor is lessened and Olivia believes he’s done attempting to bed Alicia.  A few months later, she discovers that not only is that not the case, but that Malcolm has been raping Alicia repeatedly (in his mother’s bed) and she is now pregnant.  Alicia says that Malcolm told her if she kept him out or told anyone, he’d throw her and Christopher on the street without a penny.  [sigh]

To keep the entire family from being humiliated, Olivia devises a plan.  She will fire all of the servants and hide Alicia up in the bedroom under the attic while she’s pregnant, then once she has the baby she will take Christopher and leave forever.  The entire time Alicia is hidden away, Olivia is feigning her own pregnancy, to convince the new servants that she’s expecting.  Alicia gives birth to a little girl and Malcolm names her Corrine, after his mother.  Ew.

Alicia takes Christopher and leaves with the money Garland left her.  Olivia raises Corinne as her own child, but Malcolm spoils her greatly.  He is disappointed in his sons because they have no interest in taking over the family business, and would rather be musicians.

When he is 18, Malcolm Jr buys himself a motorcycle against his father’s wishes.  He takes Corinne on a ride down the driveway and drops her off, then proceeds to lose control of the bike and drives off a cliff.  Well, they said he lost control, but I’m pretty sure that unicorn-riding dodo made it’s first appearance for this family and pushed him over the edge.

Olivia is filled with grief at the loss of her son, and takes solace from the letters she receives from her cousin – John Amos.  She offers him the position of butler at Foxworth Hall, and he accepts.  Shortly after this, Joel takes off to tour Europe with an orchestra and is killed in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps.  Luckily (since this is a prequel), we know he didn’t really die, he was just hiding out from his a-hole parents…for fifty years.

With two sons dead and a daughter that grows more spoiled by the day, Olivia is having a pretty rough time of things.  She receives a letter from Alicia, who is dying of cancer.  Her final wish is that Malcolm and Olivia take Christopher in and send him to medical school, because she lost her entire inheritance in the stock market crash.  They do.  He is 17 at this point and an incredibly handsome young man.  He and Corinne immediately hit it off, and Olivia is thrilled that they are just like the brother and sister she knows them to be.

Aww, what a happy family. >.<

UNTIL SHE CATCHES THEM HAVING SEX IN THE SWAN BED.

Jeezy creezy.  I knew it was coming, and it still freaked me out.  Christopher and Corinne try to play it off, “Oh, she’s just my half-niece!  We’re not even that closely related!  We’re totes getting married and you’ll be fine with it, right?”  Yeah.  No.  You’re actually brother and sister, get over yourselves.

They’re kicked out.  Excommunicated.  Malcolm gets incredibly sick after losing his dearest daughter, and turns to John Amos and the bible to get him through.  They don’t hear anything from either Christopher or Corinne for a number of years…

Until Christopher gets attacked by that same dodo-riding unicorn and Corinne is left penniless, and the whole story is brought full circle.

[heavy sigh]

Thus concludes the Dollanganger saga.  It was fun to write about, but I’m pretty glad I’m done with the craziness for now. Up next on the Trashy Tuesday roster:  Cave Pr0n!

Trashy Tuesday – VC Andrews (Dollangangers, part 4)

Wow.  Almost done with the Dollangangers, thank goodness.  Only two books left to cover in this series, and this one is probably going to be the most difficult to write about.  Why difficult?  Because it sucked.  Seriously.  This book was terrible.  Combine all of the horribly tragic events of the first two books into one, add Chris and Cathy as an old married couple and you have this dreck.

Seeds of Yesterday starts up 15 years after If There Be Thorns, when Corrine died in the after the fire, we find out that she left the entire Foxworth fortune to Jory and Bart.  Heh, good thing John Amos actually did die in that fire, or he’d have been pissed!  The manor that was burnt down at the end of Petals on the Wind has been rebuilt in its entirety and some old guy who was previously thought to be dead (one of Corrine’s brothers) has returned from some monastery in the Alps to be the creepy guy that’s always whispering in Bart’s ear.

Jory gets paralyzed while dancing at Bart’s birthday party.  Someone set him up to have a horrible accident, thinking he’d likely die.  Oh noes!  He was dancing with his “sister” (remember Cindy, the adopted one?) because his wife (Melodie, another prima ballerina) is pregnant and didn’t want to jeopardize her pregnancy.

Pretend this is Jory, and one of these pillars crushed his legs.

Sooooo…she doesn’t want to jeopardize her pregnancy by dancing with her husband at her brother-in-law’s birthday party, but guess what she will do?  Sleep with said brother-in-law while her husband is in critical condition in the hospital!  Yeah, right?  Cathy catches Bart and Melodie drinking and whooping it up while her oldest son is trying not to kill himself like his daddy did.  Jeeeez.

Cindy is super slutty.  Really, she is.  She invites some guy home for Christmas, promising her parents they’ll be good, but they get caught in bed together.  Too enraptured to even notice or slow their stride, Cindy gets pulled off the guy and screams  about how unfair her family is and how they shouldn’t treat her like a baby because she’s SIXTEEN NOW, DAMNIT!  She gets caught with another guy later in the story, but I will probably forget about it by the time I get there, so I’m telling you now.

Melodie starts showing, so Bart discards her like milk that’s a week past its expiration date.  She goes into labour at home, but decides not to tell anyone for some stupid reason, and by the time everyone finds out, it’s too late to get her to a hospital.  She has twins.  Had no idea there was more than one fetus, because even though this is supposed to take place sometime in the 90s, her doctor couldn’t tell.

She takes off, abandoning her children and her paraplegic husband because she just can’t handle it anymore, and she wants to go back to dancing.   We find out later that she married another dancer right after her divorce papers are signed.  Fuuuuuuuu, all women in this series are just unbelievable strumpets.  It kind of blows my mind.

I know the older couple is Chris and Cathy, and the littlies are Jory's kids...but I'm not sure who the ghostly figure is or if the young blonde is supposed to be Cindy or Melodie?

So, Cathy is pretty much a mommy to the twins, Cory and Carrie Darren and Diedre after they’re abandoned by their real mommy (sound familiar?).  Bart starts sleeping with the nanny/nurse that was hired to help take care of Jory and his kids…but Cathy still wipes his tush because he’s too embarrassed to have the pretty nurse help him out with that.  O.o

Bart and the creepy old guy, Malcolm John Amos Joel, are taking the twins off into the chapel located at the manor and teaching them all of the horrible things that Chris and Cathy heard from the grandmother while they were locked up upstairs.  They are of the Devil’s Seed and were from a garden that should never have been planted, blahblahblah.  Cathy freaks out and tells the nurse (that is now interested in JORY) to never let the twins out of her sight anymore because they’re being corrupted by her son that’s gone over the edge.

(Oh, I think I forgot to mention that if Bart is ever institutionalized for anything, he loses his entire inheritance, so he’s gotta try to keep it together in order to keep his money.)

Creepy old Joel dies of cancer at some point, Chris and Cathy are going to move out of the mansion – taking Jory, the twins and the nurse with them – but before they can…Chris is killed in an accident on a snowy road.  No, I don’t think he got pushed off a cliff by a unicorn-riding dodo bird, but I’m pretty sure there was a shark attack in there somewhere.

Edited post just to add this picture, because it's too awesome to leave out. Thanks, Meg! <3

Cathy is found up in the attic by one of the servants with a note in her hand, saying that she didn’t want to live any longer without her beloved brother/husband beside her anymore.

You know, every time I would start to empathize with Cathy, or feel bad for her…I’d remember that she spent the majority of her adult life married to her brother and that her parents were also related.  That ruined it.  Too much ick factor.

Yuck.

Last book (huzzah!) coming up on Tuesday.

Trashy Tuesday – VC Andrews (Dollangangers, part 3)

At the end of Petals on the Wind, Cathy was struggling with 2 small children and a dying (second) husband.  Paul’s dying wish was that she give in to Chris and allow him to provide for her as a husband would.  So SHE DOES!

If There Be Thorns starts up 9 years later, with Chris and Cathy living as husband and wife (ew) in Northern California.  For some reason, I keep wanting to say they live in New Mexico, even though I know that isn’t right.  Weird.  Anyway.  Cathy has a ballet school and Chris is a doctor.  They tell everyone that Chris is the younger brother of Cathy’s second husband and that Paul was the father of her younger boy.  Unlike the first two books in the series, this one is told from the PoV of Cathy’s sons – Jory and Bart.

Jory is 14 and following in the dance-steps of his parents.  He studies ballet with his mom, everyone goes on and on constantly about how talented he is – even more so than his dead daddy.  He tries to be nice to his little brother, but Bart makes things difficult between them.

Bart is a weird kid.  There’s just no other word to describe him.  He suffers from some rare disorder, which is described as having nerve endings that don’t quite reach his skin, so he doesn’t really feel pain.  It sounds somewhat like CIPA, but I’m pretty sure I remember him sweating in the story – so that can’t be entirely correct.  Who knows, maybe VC Andrews made it up.

Bart and Jory like to visit the abandoned mansion next door, even though they know they’re not supposed to be hanging out there where it’s super dangerous.  The summer of Bart’s 10th birthday, an old lady (that dresses all in black and wears a veil…oooh, mysterious!) moves in and Bart starts spending all of his free time with her.  She buys him all kinds of presents and asks him to call her grandmother.  She’s also got a creepy butler, who talks to Bart when no one else is around.  Creepy butler (John Amos) tells Bart that the old lady really is his grandmother and gives him the journal of his great-grandfather, Malcolm Foxworth.  The journal is full of misogyny.  Ol’ Malcolm blames everything that went wrong in his life on the fact that his mommy left him when he was little, so he spends a lot of time talking about how women are the worst, and “I’ll SHOW THEM!” type behaviour.

Bart has an incredibly active imagination, so he starts pretending that he actually is Malcolm.  Walking like an old man, talking in a different voice, acting like a complete douche, etc.

One day while Bart is digging around in the dirt and the “grandmother” is talking to him over the wall between the two properties, he finds the mostly decomposed corpse of a kitten.  Grandmother asks him if that was her kitten that went missing, but Bart tells her that he has no idea how it got there.  Of course he doesn’t.  He’s not a weird kid that could possibly be killing small animals.  Nooooo, not at all.

Bart’s fondest wish is to have a pony, but grandmother doesn’t want to get him one because if he goes home smelling like a horse, mommy and daddy will know that something’s up.  Instead of a pony, she gets him a Saint Bernard puppy that is “just as good.”  The pony puppy is named Apple, and Bart shows us just how strange he is by deciding that he will turn the canine into an equine if he just wishes hard enough, and only does pony things with it – like riding it around and trying to force it to eat hay like a good pony should.

Because smelling like Saint Bernard drool is infinitely better than smelling like horse.

Jory’s doggy (that interestingly enough was given to him by Bart’s real father) goes missing, and all eyes are on Bart.  No one else knows about the kitten, but they all know that he’s pretty strange and that the dog never really liked him anyway.  Since he suspects his little brother of doing in his pet, Jory starts following Bart, and discovers Apple in the barn next door.  Bart freaks the eff out and tells Jory that this is HIS PONY and he’d better stay away because Apple can’t love anyone but him.  Wow, Bart.  Way to convince people you’ve got it together.

While Jory is struggling with whether or not to tell people about Bart hanging around with the old lady and the creepy butler guy, Bart goes and gets a rusty nail stuck in his knee.  Only since he doesn’t feel pain like normal people do, he continues on about his daily craziness shenanigans and doesn’t think about it other than to poke it with a dirty finger (and he’s been cleaning out his ‘pony’s’ stall, so you know just what was on his fingers…gross, but I digress).  Bart’s leg gets WAY infected (dur, just because he can’t feel pain doesn’t mean he’s immune to infection!) and he has to spend his 10th birthday in ICU.  He’s allergic to every antibiotic they give him and almost doesn’t make it.

Jory goes to take care of Apple while Bart is in the hospital and discovers that the pony puppy is being mistreated.  He’s locked up in the dark barn, his food and water is just out of reach, and he’s all covered in poo because no one has been cleaning up after him.  Did Bart just leave the dog locked up and no one has checked on him?  What, exactly, is the deal here?

Bart survives, Chris and Cathy adopt a little girl (kind of under the table because no one really knows about their situation) and this fuels Bart’s ragey little psychosis even further.  He’s mean to Cindy (dear lord, another C name?!), Apple dies, Cathy insists on dancing with Jory at a recital, has an accident and her dancing days are completely over.  Oh, and John Amos gets even weirder than before.

Cathy decides to start writing a book about their childhood (which we’re to assume is where the manuscript for Flowers in the Attic came from) and of course the kids read it.  Uh oh.  Now they know that Chris isn’t really Paul’s brother, he’s THEIR UNCLE!  More ew.  Jory confesses that Bart has been spending far too much time with the creepazoids next door and so Chris goes over to confront the old lady.  Gasp!  Shock!  Horror!  It’s his mom!  He thought she was locked up in an asylum back east!  ”You leave Bart alone!”  ”But he should have been my son since his father was my husband and my real kids left me after I kept them locked up for years!  Besides, you don’t want me to tell everyone who your ‘wife’ is, do you?”

[sigh]

Of course, Cathy goes next door on one dark and stormy night to confront the old lady that’s been poisoning her son’s mind and discovers the wicked witch next door is her mother.  Wait, Chris kept a secret from her?  OMG!  Crazy.  John Amos works with Bart to lock Corrine and Cathy in the attic basement.  John Amos has been reading a little bit too much of Malcolm’s diary and thinks women are sooperevil creatures, bent on the destruction of man.  PLUS, if Corinne dies, he gets all of her money.

House is set on fire, Chris, Cathy, Jory and Bart escape.  John Amos dies in the fire, Corrine succumbs to smoke inhalation (I think, I really was only half paying attention at this point), but not before we find out that it wasn’t Bart that was killing all the little animals.  It was the creepier old man, trying to frame the creepy kid.

The end.

Oh, but wait.  There are still two more books.  Will cover Seeds of Yesterday on the Trashy Tuesday – Thursday Edition.  See you then!

ps.  Happy Birthday, Heather!  <3