Who's on top and who's on bottom now!?

Last night, I spent two and a half hours reading a V.C. Andrews book, when I should have been doing any number of things. For some reason, though, I didn't open the wine from the Liquor Barn next to Shalimar.*
And I know you want to hear all about the book.
I got it at my library's kickass annual Friends booksale, on $3/bag day.**
This is what Dawn looks like:

(the Amazon excerpt is a good bit)

At the beginning of the book, Dawn is a naive 14yrold living with her 16yrold brother Jimmy, her dad Ormond, and her mother, Sarah Jane. Who is pregnant with Fern.
A close reader (by which I mean one who has read at least one other trashy novel and/or is not a moron) will notice that, while Jimmy and their parents all have dark complections (Gypsies? Mexican? Injuns? Which do you think is most romantical?), Dawn is Blondy "Freckles" McBlueEyes.
That close reader will also notice that Dawn describes her love interest, Philip, as having similar looks to hers. Several times.
And anyone who knows anything about V.C. Andrews will expect someone to sleep with their brother any damn minute now.

Dawn doesn't disappoint. She actually hooks up with TWO brothers: Jimmy (after it's determined that they aren't related, though there's this whole bit about how their "hearts knew all along" they weren't related or something) and Philip. Philip and Dawn make out before AND after they find out they're siblings. Actually, Philip rapes Dawn in a very Spike and Buffy in the bathroom scene.
The bathroom off the tiny room on the ground floor of her new rich family's huge hotel/estate in Virginia Beach. Dawn is given the tiny room and made to be a chambermaid by her Evil Grandmother***, who totally rules over everything and everyone at the hotel.
But wait! Evil Grandmother isn't actually her grandmother! Dawn's mother was a tramp and got pregnant by a traveling musician (so that's why grandmother was so mad Dawn sang at her...), so Evil Grandmother came up with this plan where they would give Dawn to Ormond and SJ, who had just had a stillborn baby, and pretend to the rest of the world, including Evil Grandmother's son, that Dawn had been stolen away.
And Dawn's real name is Eugenia, and for some reason in a book with a 1990 copyright, everyone acts like being named Dawn is the craziest thing ever.

This book has 2 sequels. Considering that I'm pissed off at my usual hot weather trashy author, Anne Rice, for what she did to Mona Mayfair, I'm looking forward to both of them. Unfortunately, this will probably mean breaking my unspoken rule about only buying V.C. Andrews' books at library booksales.




*God bless Kentucky, and especially Louisville, where you can buy booze after 1 on Sundays. It just warms my little Quaker-liquor-laws-raised heart.
**Stay tuned for more PoBaL posts re: this years booksale. I got 2 disgusting chairs for $1 and several books of outdated sexual advice for teenagers.
***Everyone talks about V.C. Andrews penchant for the hot, hot incest, but I can't be the only person who wonders what she's got against grammas. Her books always have mean, nasty, control-freak grandmothers who everyone is afraid to cross, even to the point of poisoning their own children.