Seeds of Yesterday

Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Tik Tok | You can find my review here. “I don’t explain love, Bart. I don’t think anyone can. It grows from day to day from having contact with that other person who understands your needs, and you understand theirs. It starts with a faltering flutter that touches your heart and makes you vulnerable to everything beautiful.” Seeds of Yesterday proved to be the perfect combination of all of V.C. Andrews' strengths. The pure soapy, campy, overdone dramatics. The Gothic atmosphere. Bittersweet and unsettling prose. A dark, deeply entwined, twisted, family dynamic. It was exactly what I'd hoped If There Be Thorns could have been: the perfect marriage of Flowers in the Attic and Petals on the Wind. (And Cindy! Honestly, I don't always approve of the fact that someone keeps writing under the V.C. Andrews name decades after her death, but I'd totally sell my left kidney for a series of books that center around Cindy Sheffield. Thanks.) As always, Seeds of Yesterday was unsettling and problematic. Andrews' signature plot-twists lead to a series of trigger warnings that are all her own. I'm still petitioning to get a standard 'V.C. Andrews' warning when it comes to triggers. This time around, we're back to primarily seeing the story unravel through our beloved Cathy's eyes, instead of her sons. Now, adults in their own right, both Bart and Jory show their more compelling sides. Jory is still dull and Bart is still a mess. Together, there is a hell of a lot of rivalry, heart-ache, and more. Seeds of Yesterday should have come with a tagline: now with more sibling betrayal and general bickering! Seeds of Yesterday has very little downtime. While it still lacks the same darkness that Flowers in the Attic possessed (and really, can anything beat that novel?) there was plenty melodrama for us to swim in.V.C. Andrews was in fine form when it came down to the dramatics featured in Seeds of Yesterday. From creepy, long-lost, dying uncles weaseling their way into the picture, to Bart rebuilding Foxworth and constant preachy nature, Cindy's budding sexuality and the way she and Bart still can't seem to get along, Jory's marriage crumbling and an accident that takes away his ability to walk, straight to the eventual loss of Christopher and Cathy, Seeds of Yesterday rarely gives readers the chance to breathe. While it doesn't wrap everything up in the nicest of bows (it is a V.C. Andrews novel, after all) there is this finality in the way that the original saga ends. Seeds of Yesterday offers many callbacks to the first three books in the series and ends in a way that feels all too tragic and right. It's surely a mess, but it's at least entertaining. Mostly it left me wondering what the fresh hell I just read. And that was kind of the point.