I had never even heard of it before, I just randomly picked it up at the library. It’s not as famous of a teen book here in Brazil as it is in the US. I had never read anything by the author before.
It’s one of those books where what is good about it is very good, so much you kind of brush past the bad. I enjoyed following the kids in their day to day lives in the attic, the way Chris and Cathy slowly become the real parents of the twins, the way they try to make life less horrible by reading and making art with them, and try to hold on to the hope their mother still cares about them. I hated the grandma character the moment I saw her; she hits very close to home for anyone with ultra-conservative religious family. The punishments she inflicted on them, the pain of starvation, the sinking feeling the mother just does not care anymore, all of that was well-executed in my opinion. I saw the grandpa ending twist coming hundreds of pages earlier, but it still hurt to read
It could have been so good, man. Why, just why did she have to make Chris and Cathy fall in love?
I really wish the book had not dwelled so much on it. Even as an only child who doesn’t know first hand how siblings feel about each other, it was still enough to make me very, very uncomfortable. Cathy describes Chris in such weird terms, talking about how handsome and strong he is, how he was beginning to look “like a man” and she was attracted to “the thing between his thighs”… yeah. I don’t think that’s how sisters describe their older brothers. I was trying to be generous and play psychologist while reading, thinking that maybe locking up growing teens for three years might screw up their minds in this way, especially because they didn’t really get any proper sex-ed. For a good portion of the book, I was able to brush it off as yet another injury to their mental health, not just a thinly-veiled fetish of Andrews (which it clearly is).
But I’m pretty sure none of it makes you rape your sister and finish inside of her. And Cathy BLAMED HERSELF for it too, saying she shouldn’t have worn see-through pajamas close to him when she “knew he had needs”.
Just… no. It’s the 50s, of course she would think that… but nothing in the narration or the overall meta of the story does anything to indicate Cathy is wrong here.
Dialogue was also a weak point. I’ve been reading a lot of older books, so I’m growing more tolerant to unrealistic and flowery dialogue, but it feels weird in the mouth a 12-year-old in a YA book. I found the prose itself easy to follow and even pretty and inspiring in some points, but none of the siblings speak like kids their age.
Overall, I liked some aspects of the book a lot and I’m sad I can’t really recommend it because of the ick factor of it all. I could have been so much better had the siblings just had a normal freaking relationship. Godamnit, what’s with YA authors and incest?
by Leticia_the_bookworm