Okay, this one was bad. And not just ironically bad, kitschy bad, but badly written, and both morally bad and bad as literature, and in a connected way. I did do a quick bit of research and discovered that this book was written twenty years after the death of the author, and that the "V.C. Andrews" who wrote this book was actually a ghostwriter hired to carry on Andrews' legacy. So, I guess I can't judge Andrews by this book...
But also, seriously: content warning for my review, since this book involves various types of child abuse.
"Broken Flower" is a gothic coming-of-age novel, published in 2006, published under the name "V.C. Andrews", with that name now being a franchise for books written in Andrews' style, apparently. When I bought this book, it was in the horror section, and my impression was that Andrews' wrote gothic horror. This book is not a horror book, although it does borrow some ideas from the horror genre. The only thing horrific about this book is that it uses every possible lifetime original movie plot idea, only with less taste. The story centers around Jordan March, a six year old girl who is the scion of a wealthy family and who also has precocious puberty starting right before she turns seven. This is just the start of the story, she also has a controlling grandmother, a father who is having an affair, a mother who...doesn't do much...and a genius brother. Or at least we are told he is a genius. Jordan getting breasts and a period right before she turns seven are just the beginning of a story, that, as mentioned, involves every possible soap opera plot. Jordan's physical development isn't really that central to the plot, partly because there is no plot. Jordan getting physically, psychologically and sexually abused is. Just when we are getting into that plot, her parents get into a car crash leading to her father being half-paralyzed and her mother going into a coma, and then a strict governess comes into the house. When the governess slaps Jordan, her older brother murders her (the governess) with strychnine and then her father comes home and gets a girlfriend. And then her grandmother has a stroke and the book ends with Jordan going to live with a great-aunt. That is more or less the plot.
Okay, so one sentence in that description is two things mashed together. "When the governess slaps Jordan, her older brother murders the governess with strychnine and then her father comes and gets a girlfriend." And here we have one of the major literary problems with this book: there is a flatness to it that is unrealistic. Jordan is buffeted around, but the book treats something that is very unusual and a bit gothic (a poisoned governess) with something that is a bog standard part of growing up (Daddy gets a girlfriend).
And there is something even worse: a meat loaf sandwich. When he returns from the hospital, Jordan's father is offered a meat loaf sandwich. What is so bad about that? Well, a few pages from there, Jordan's grandmother buys her a "computer game I could hook into a television set". In 2006, when this book was published (and the book does make reference to being in the "21st century") how many men's favorite meal was a "meat loaf sandwich"? And what exactly is a "computer game" that could "hook into a television set"? Okay, these things might seem minor quabbles with the book's setting, but there are more obvious examples of things that just don't fit. When (right before the car accident), Jordan's mother talks about wanting a divorce, people talk with distress about the children living in a "broken home". When my parents got divorced in the 1980s, while it caused some anxiety on my part, the idea of children living in "broken homes" was no longer a social stigma. Much less in 2006. And when Jordan gets the strict governess, she washes Jordan's mouth out for soap for saying "orgasm"...and insist that Jordan uses the term "monthlies" to refer to menstruation. Maybe I am not an expert on all the ways women talk about menstruation, but I think the term "monthlies" probably faded from use sometime in the 1950s. And later on, when Jordan's older brother, Ian, finds out that the governess slapped Jordan, he decides to poison her. Despite being described as a cool thinker, and the fact that he has an opportunity to report it to a social worker, he decides to murder her instead. In 2006, reporting that a licensed school teacher slapped a 7 year old girl would probably raise the interest of social workers very quickly. The book's plot is shot through with attitudes and actions that seem out of place in its setting.
Me pointing out these flaws isn't quibbling about details. To return to the central point: writing a book that centers around the sexual development of a seven year old girl is on a bit of problematic ground. There are two ways to make it less offensive: make it much less realistic, or make it much more realistic. When I bought this book, it was in the horror section, and though I knew Andrews touched on topics like incest, I thought it was from a gothic standpoint, and I assumed that a few dozen pages into this book we would learn the protagonist was a vampire or disposed royalty or something. Or the book could have been more realistic: young people do have sexual feelings and with the right writer, discussing them can be done tastefully. But this book instead is done as a soap opera, seeming exploitive, and a little too interested in heaping abuse on the protagonist. But the soap opera also doesn't get quite unrealistic enough that we can feel comfortable knowing that none of this is real.
This book is both transgressive and boring. Both far-fetched and pedestrian. On several levels, this is the worst book I have read in a while.