Petals on the Wind

This is another book that I read a while ago, actually it was before New Years. I was just to Flowers in the Attic) is her most popular, and while most people know the first book, Petals on the Wind its first sequel is not nearly as popular.

busy to write about it, and then sort of forgot about it until I found the novel when I was cleaning out my car. I was a huge VC Andrews fan in my youth. I read nearly everything of hers I could get my hands on, and in the days before eBooks and the popularity and ease of Amazon, getting multiple series with four plus books each meant I spend a lot of time in all sorts of book stores and yard sales. The Dollanganger series (

The story of Cathy, Chris and Carrie continues right where the horror of Flowers in the Attic leaves off. The three children are no longer just children, Chris in nearly an adult, Cathy should be in high school, and while Carrie looks and acts like a five year old she is much older. The three end up living with a widowed doctor, and in the grand tradition of VC Andrews and romance novels, the guardian ends up falling in love and having an affair with his under aged ward Cathy. Big sighs all around, along with a few “ewwws” and “gross.”

However, Cathy isn’t satisfied with the older doctor Paul and leaves him for the young dancer Julian without even breaking off her engagement to the doctor. After touring the world, and both Cathy and Julian having numerous affairs, Julian is killed in a motor vehicle accident leaving Cathy with mountains of debt, pregnant and alone.

After Julian’s death, Cathy becomes obsessed with destroying her mother, blaming her again for all the problems that she has encountered in her life. (Really, she made her own mistakes as an adult, but lets never move on from childhood trauma). She then moves with her baby and younger sister to the town her mother resides in. Only, her sister commits suicide by swallowing rat poisoning so that she can be with her twin brother who died over a decade before. Spends months seducing her mother’s new husband and then tells her mother all the sorted details of the affair in public. Her mother and lover are then burned to death in a fire that tears apart the entire building leaving ashes of the house the children were once held captive in.

Feeling like she finally got revenge on her mother and grandmother, Cathy moves back in with doctor Paul. The two marry and have a son, although Paul soon dies from heart problems (so, basically everyone that Cathy sleeps with dies at a very young age). After Paul’s death, she decides to marry her brother Chris, as the two have had an interesting sexual and loving past. They move out to California so that no one will know they were actually brother and sister, and then raise Cathy’s two children as their own.

Weird, yes. A typical VC Andrews romance novel, also Yes. These kind of novels tend to be a little addicting to read, and if you can get past the uggg and ewwww factor they can be great beach and sun bathing books.

The Program by Suzanne Young

Imagine a future where 1 in 3 teens commits suicide, and no one knows why. That is the not so far away future that Suzanne Young created in The Program. Teen suicide is at an all time high, and after all theories and medications have been tossed aside, the United States funds a new tactic, The Program. The Program is the only thing that has been shown to work in preventing suicide, but it might not be worth it. All teens are monitored at school, taking daily assessments on their mental wellbeing, and are encouraged to report strange and depressed behavior. When a student is determined to be depressed, suicidal, or in danger of becoming suicidal, they are taken away by the government and doctors. Locked in a facility, they are monitored and have their memory erased becoming a blank slate, a shell of what they were.

Sloane knows to be careful, she doesn’t cry or throw tantrums, she keeps her feeling inside all the while putting on a brave face to the outside world. She does what she is supposed to do in order to fly under the radar, especially because she knows she has been flagged. Her older brother committed suicide in front of her, and her friend Lacey went into the program a few weeks earlier. But Sloane isn’t contemplating suicide, she has her boyfriend James and Miller (Lacey’s boyfriend) to keep her grounded. She thought they could stick it out till they turned 18 and left, but that was before Lacey came back from the program.

Contact with people returning from the program is limited, and they aren’t to have contact with friends they had before. Miller is determined to see her though, he wants to see if she’ll remember him. So he keeps going to the center trying to jog her memory, but its been wiped completely clean. Devastated, he kills himself, wanting to die rather then be sent to the program where all his memories will be taken away.

The lose is more than James can bare, Sloane finds him cutting after the incident and knows that James isn’t going to make it. James will get flagged and taken in, they will wipe him clean and she’ll have nothing left. Sloane takes in upon herself to try and get him through, doing his homework, dressing him, being overly affectionate with her attention at school, anything she can think to try and keep him there with her. But it doesn’t work, and men come and take him away one day in class.

Sloane slowly unravels after that; she tries to hold it together, but after her brother’s suicide her mother doesn’t want to take any chances, and turns Sloane into the programs main facility. Sloane is scared and attempts to be rebellious, but the drugs they give her make it hard to fight back, and slowly she is losing memories. Memories of James, and she’ll do anything to try and hang on to something, anything. And one of the handlers can give her one memory to hang on to, in exchange for a physical relationship.

Sloane thinks it might be worth it, but then there is Realm. Realm who is in treatment with her, and makes her feel special and that things will be okay again. As her memories of James continue to be erased, Realm starts to fill the void and emptiness inside. But something is wrong, something is going on inside the walls of the program, and every time Sloane learns one of its secrets the information is wiped away.

That is only the first half of the book. It is an intense book, and I cried more than a handful of times. I was a little worried that is would be to much of a romance for my taste, but to me it read more like a dystopian mystery novel that happens to have a relationship. I couldn’t put the book down, and upon finishing the novel I not only made it my Facebook status, but tweeted the author to tell her how amazing the novel was. I cannot wait until the sequel comes out, and I already preordered it. I would recommend it to anyone who likes fantasy, mystery, teen, young adult, science fiction, and can deal with emotional turmoil.

Killing Rachel (Murder Notebooks #2)

Anything entitled The Murder Notebooks should be fascinating right? Not so, I should have looked more into the plot and reviews before I purchased the novel. The Murder Notebooks: Killing Rachel by Anne Cassidy takes play in London, following the investigation of teenager Rose looking for her missing parents. This is the second book in the series, but I never read the first one. To be honest, I didn’t know that Killing Rachel was the second, but it really didn’t matter. The novel gives enough backstory to get by.

The main thread that goes through this series is that five years ago, Rose’s parents disappeared. Rose believes them to be dead, but her brother Josh hasn’t given up. He believes that there is a conspiracy, and that because of their parent’s work in Cold Cases the Russian Mob took them. This novel has the two looking through old letters and cases from their parents, and investigating places and people mentioned. Josh takes them to an abandoned cabin, a place he vaguely remembers, hoping that their parents might be hiding out there. Unfortunately, a group of Russian gangsters kidnap and torture Josh, hoping that he will lead them to the information they want.

Old police friends are telling Rose and Josh different things, which means that some of their parent’s friends have to be working with the Russians and are lying about what has really happened.

That is only part of this novel though. Rachel was an old friend of Rose’s while at boarding school, and she has been found dead, drowned in the lake by school. Despite a falling out months earlier, Rose goes back to school to offer her condolences and talk to the police. While their, Rose begins looking into Rachel’s life and death. A death that wasn’t a suicide like everyone is saying, but murder. Was it an ex-boyfriend, the brother of a suicidal friend, hurt and disgruntled classmate; Rose has taken it upon herself to find out.

Book was rather boring, mainly because the main character has no friends. There is so little interaction and personality that it is hard to get behind her as a character or lose yourself in her story. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy novels like Killing Mr. Griffin, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and other conspiracy and murder young adult books.