Bittersweet Dreams

Did the author have a page quota?

I forgive a lot when I read V.C. Andrews novels. I mean, she's been dead for over thirty years. Her ghostwriter tries really hard but usually just ends up annoying me. This book is almost too much of an annoyance to read. The main character, Mayfair, is super intelligent and this fact gets repeated on almost every page. She spouts facts like a fountain, which I suppose is what a genius might do, but the author explains these facts like his audience is made up of toddlers. It seems every other sentence in the book is devoted to either an excuse to mention sex or to offend gay people. "Am I gay?" "Could I be gay?" "You don't want to be gay, do you?" I know intolerance exists in places but this book is set in present day Los Angeles, probably the last place I'd expect such an attitude, even from the very wealthy. It's almost as if the teenagers in the private school in this book are stuck in some mid-80s time warp where homosexuality is still grossly misunderstood.

Most of the time it just seems like the author is trying to fill space instead of giving his readers any kind of interesting plot. The characters rarely have more than a single personality trait (Mayfair is smart, Julie's a dumb gold digger socialite, Mr. Taylor is a lecherous teacher) and it takes like a million chapters before anything other than inane internal dialogue occurs.

Mr. Niederman (the ghost writer) keeps churning out boring book after boring book with the same characters every time. He desperately needs to channel V.C.'s spirit for more ideas before publishing another novel about a 16-year old friendless girl without a mother who pines about her sexuality for 300 pages. I'm going to finish the book out of my respect for Virginia Andrews (and the fact that I paid for this piece of crap) but it's definitely not going to be easy.