Whitefern

It's been at least 20 years if not more since I read My Sweet Audrina. I can't say I remember every detail about it but I remember that I liked it very much and so was quite anxious to read the sequel.

Audrina's life as a married woman has not seemed to mature her very much. She has much of the same naiveté and innocent too trusting nature of a young girl.

Her marriage to Arden has not turned out as she had hoped and although her father has left her controlling interest in his business she lacks the drive and maturity to do anything about it. She spends most of her time caring for her developmentally challenged sister but due to her own too trusting nature she is not as vigilant in protecting her as one would hope.

If you read the first book then this is certainly worth a read but I found the plot quite predictable and it was fairly obvious how it would all end.


I received an advance copy for review.

Being a V.C. Andrews junkie in my darker moments, I couldn't quite resist this when I saw it on Netgalley. If you've ever read a V.C. Andrews book (or at least one released under her name), you can probably make a good guess on how reading this went, and you'd be remarkably right in almost everything you guessed. It was compulsively readable, but a bit obvious.

Some of that is due to the fact that I've read quite a few of these books, honestly. However, there's generally at least one shocking bit of a twist that I didn't see coming, and one of my issues with this in particular was that I had everything laid out pretty early on in the story and was just waiting for the twists. I don't know if that says something terrifying about my mind (it may), but a level of experience with the genre is likely to net others the same result.

My Sweet Audrina (to which this is a sequel) was one of the stronger Andrews books, I always felt, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the character arcs taken in this. Of course, you can't have a novel of this type without some character growth (degeneration?) to give you new villains, but I guess I was hoping for more expansion in the cast than I got.

Audrina continues to be much of the same, and sometimes it is rough to read her because of that--she shows signs of fire occasionally, but she's manipulated and blind throughout. Not necessarily a critique of the book, given she's an established character and she hasn't changed, but it did make things harder now that she is older.

Over all I rather enjoyed this, and I'm glad I picked it up. As a heads up to anyone interested, definitely read My Sweet Audrina first if you intend to read it at all--like many sequels, this spoils basically all the twists and plot points of the first, and missing those will be missing quite a bit of the fun.

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.