My Sweet Audrina (1982) is an eerie, claustrophobic tale told in the voice of the 'surviving' daughter of Damian and Lucietta Adare, and set almost entirely in Whitefern, their secluded Victorian-era mansion. While most of Andrews's short career was centred on documenting two fictional families –the Dollangangers and the Casteels – she did produce one stand-alone novel in her lifetime. Andrews has rare staying power in a YA market saturated with Twilight and The Hunger Games spawn. The numbers prove that many decades later, the ghost of V.C. She's been translated into more than a dozen languages, and there are now 80-plus books that bear her name – with at least two more on the way this year.

Her disturbing tale of four beautiful children locked in an attic for years by their pious grandmother went on to become a bestseller in mere weeks, and secured Andrews wealth, fame and multiple book deals.īy the time she died of breast cancer in 1986, Andrews had written six subsequent novels, garnering so much commercial success that ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman was called in to finish her manuscripts and continue her legacy. At the time, she was a relative literary unknown, a wheelchair-bound writer from Virginia, cared for by her mother while living with the chronic pain of rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, it's worthy to note that although originally published for an adult mass market, the teen interest was so strong that the books were later explicitly remarketed as Young Adult (YA) fare.Īndrews published Flowers in the Attic in 1979 at the age of 56. By creating these complex and often outrageous family sagas, the author allowed us clandestine access to the very subject matter the adults in our lives were shielding us from. Whether intentional (or altogether healthy), there was a formative, coming-of-age quality to the teen-girl culture that surrounded Andrews's stories. My own worn copy of Flowers in the Attic was gifted to me by an older, wiser summer camp counsellor, and passed along with the whispered warning, 'the brother and sister do it.' When I was all done and sufficiently shocked by its content, my copy went along to another girl who was not yet initiated. The hugely successful Gothic horrors were like an illicit drug – grown-up fairy tales full of sex, violence and the intrigue of wealth and privilege. Andrews novels to each other like they were contraband.

When I was a teen in the early 1990s, young women covertly slipped V.C.

My sweet audrina book