Customer Reviews

Dawn (Cutler) (G K Hall Large Print Book Series)

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I used to read VC Andrews back when I was in my teens. I have never forgotten the magic of Flowers in the Attic. The Cutler series has been on my book shelf for years needless to say, and finally I've decided to pick it up. And so far I'm pleased that I did!

Dawn is the first in the 5 book series and a decent start. The story is a little slow at first, but picks up quickly towards the middle and end with many shocking secrets revealed. As we meet Dawn she's a 14 year old from a poor family who due to a new job her dad received now has the opportunity to go to a private school. This foreshadows what her life is about to turn into down the road and is kind of a transitional phase between her poor life full of struggles to her new life full of opportunity and the unknown. You won't be able to guess where her life takes her...

I would of course recommend this book more to teens than to adults, even though I am an adult who did enjoy this guilty pleasure and easy read. VC Andrews is famous for writing detailed stories that pull you into her web and this series appears it's no different, I'm already half way through the next book Secrets of the Morning.

To say that VC Andrews has become formulaic would be a major understatement. A ridiculously gorgeous 12-14 year old girl with "flaxen blond hair" and "cerulean blue eyes" has her life radically altered when she discovers she's a member of a wealthy socialite Virginian family. However the family is more psychotic than-well no other family in the history of literature is even on the same level of insanity that exists in VC Andrews. The psycho family delights in tormenting the heroine whom ends up sleeping with her older teenage brother.

`Dawn' is no exception. Here the formula is applied to Dawn Longchamp. The Longchamps are dirt poor Virginians. Poor, but pleasant and as happy as poor family can be. A series of unfortunate events tare the family apart and Dawn is sent to live with her "real" family she never knew existed, the Cutlers whom make Dawn's life a living hell. Though nothing as extreme as being tortured in an attic, Dawn mostly endures humiliations.

A very obvious rehash of `Flowers in the Attic'. In fact there's even a psycho grandmother and an attic. Dawn is also locked in one room of their giant mansion. Grandmother Cutler also wishes to erase the mere existence and memory of Dawn's previous family.

As for the only reason you read VC Andrews, the incest, there's plenty of it. Yes you won't be bored with `Dawn'. Her brothers aren't. The twist here is, who is Dawn's true soul mate? Jimmy, the brother she grew up with? Or her biological brother Philip?

I was able to forgive the fact that `Dawn' is VERY obviously a rehash of `Flowers in the Attic.' It doesn't even pretend to be anything else. With a heavy amount of incest it gives the audience what it wants. I can't blame VC Andrew's ghostwriter for using what works.

My only and big objection to `Dawn' is that it is VERY predictable. By page 150 I had accurately predicted the rest of the book. I was bored with waiting for the characters to catch up.

If we're not going to attempt a suspenseful plot then why slow down the book with one? A lot of time and space is wasted. Just cut to the chase. Or in this case the incest.

I'm was so dissappointed in Dawn. I knew what was going to happen to Dawn from the first chapter on to the last. It was so predictable, i.e long lost rich family, incest, a grandmother who hates her, and a weak mother and father. Before it was "revealed" I knew she was dating her brother. I also knew her brother was going to still want to carry on their relationship. And the sister hating her, now that was a stretch of the imagination, NOT! This story was so predictable, maybe because the Andrews family won't let the writers stray to far V.C. Andrews original Flowers in the Attic series.

I have read all of the Dollanganger (Flowers in the Attic) books, and those are, hands down, the best series/books that are actually written by VC Andrews herself. I read reviews about Dawn, and was hesitant to read it because I know it is by the ghostwriter. When I first started reading the book, I was turned off by characters/setting sounding too similar to previous, original VC Andrews books. The character, Dawn, was too much like Cathy and Heaven from previous series.

This book grew on me, but I was still very turned off when I would read a line of description that was almost word for word from previous books. For example, of course, Dawn's incestuous brother has "flaxen blond hair and cerulean blue eyes"... and the grandma has "icy" or "gray steel eyes" and hair that is pulled so tightly... these are all exact rip-offs from Flowers in the attic. How could a writer, even if he is writing under someone else's name, not have been more creative than that?? Then, the characters in general are mostly the same as other characters in previous books. There is a harsh, mean grandmother, an air-headed, self absorbed young mother, incestuous brothers (all Flowers in the Attic), a rotten conniving "replacement" sister (My Sweet Audrina) and Dawn's poor family (Heaven).

Even a lot of the plot takes from other Andrews books. The kids being at a rich private school is from Petals on the Wind where Carrie goes to one similar and similar things happen to her. Also, the "brother" Jimmy and her sister Fern being separated from her and sent away to other homes is just like what happens in Heaven, with those children. Also, in Dawn, she ends up going to New York to pursue her dreams of becoming a singer, exactly how Cathy goes to NY to become a dancer...some of the similarities are a shame. I could go on and on.

I will admit that I thought the story was overall interesting and I read the book easily in two days. I might continue with the rest of this family series, but I wish this ghostwriter had more fresh ideas and didn't rip-off other successful, magical VC Andrews originals.

$11.99 for a digital copy of a book first published around 1990 is ridiculous! Are they only handing out so many copies of this book for the Kindle? This is just another example of publishers being greedy, and preying on people's sense of nostalgia! To anyone out there thinking about buying this book for your Kindle, I say don't! Buy it used,then the publisher doesn't get a single penny.

As all of V.C. Andrews books reveal...there are many twists and turns along the way of life. Dawn, a girl who finds herself torn between what she once thought as truth, and what she now knows as truth, is shown that life isn't always what you believe it to be. There is a slow start to this book, which makes one sort of believe that nothing too bad will happen. However, when it comes to it, we learn there are many secrets in the Cutler family, and Dawn is just one of them. To write much more would spoil everything entirely. I would personally recommend this book to a teenage girl trying to discover who she really is. Also, I would recommend this book, and the entire series to anyone willing to get a taste of what lies and deceit are in a family.

This book could have been better. There are some mistakes, of which I will name one. When the Longchamp family is seperated, its about a year after the book started. Dawn was fourteen in April, having a May birth, when Momma told gave birht to Fern. A month later, she is fifteen. Then the following April, Momma dies, and in June the family is seperated. That would make Dawn sixteen, which is appropiate considering she is sixteen at the beginning of Secrets of the Morning. Fern, though is a year old, and yet she can say things like "Dawn, up" All 12 month old kids I heard of cannot say that. It requires a superior verbosity than a one year old has. I think Fern should have been two. If you look at the preview in Web of Dreams, it states that Dawn is twelve and Jimmy is fourteen. Why did they change their ages?

Let me first say that I'm not one of those people who hate the ghostwriter who wrote this book, as so many other Andrews fans are. As a matter of fact, although I prefer the books Andrews wrote herself, I've enjoyed a lot of the books Niederman wrote under her name.

I've read them all and been entertained by them all, even this one. When I first read it I was in 9th grade. I read it right after it came out and I remember being capitvated by it on the bus ride home. Then, of course I reread it (that's what teenagers do with Andrews' books).

However, this was one of the most insipid that he wrote, which is not to say that you shouldn't read it, just that its stupidity will anger you. Actually, it was the first of the new series that he created-supposedly "inspired" as the disclaimer says, by "incomplete stories" V.C. had somewhere before her death. I don't know about you, but I've always found the vageness of that claim a little convienient. Where are these stories? How many were there? Be specific!

Anyway, this story is about a weird Cathy (Flowers in the Attic)/Heaven mix. Bacially, trying to not disappoint fans, Niederman thought a composite of all the heroines Andrews had created would satisfy. (Except Audrina-I don't think Audrina comes up. I love Audrina BTW). But it doesn't work because Dawn doesn't have a developed story/character of her own that's believable, it's like someone just cut and paste from "Flowers in the Attic", "Heaven" and "Dark Angel" to make her story.

In some cases, sentences are taken word for word from Flowers in the Attic-for instance, creepily enough, when Dawn is raped by her brother, Niederman uses the exact same sentence to describe it as Andrews had Cathy use to describe HER rape by HER brother! (Something disgusting about "my resistant flesh tearing and bleeding" ). Niederman thinks that if the same experiences happen to Dawn that did to the other characters, we'll somehow be convinced. But the magic of Andrews was that she invented new demented abuses/relatives for each heroine! Be creative!

Like Cathy, Dawn is blonde, has an evil grandmother, has a brother obsessed with her-wait, two brothers obsessed with her-her "foster brother" and her biological brother. She's in love with the former and attracted to the latter for a time period. Until she knows it's her brother! Unlike Andrews', Niederman does not want to take that crazy step where people KNOW it's their relative-and don't care!!! (Cathy and Chris and Heaven and Troy kept at it despite knowing they were blood related).
Like Cathy, she also has religious fanatic relatives.

Like Heaven, Dawn is raised by poor white rural people who turn out not to be her biological parents. And I don't remember exactly, but I think Dawn's foster parents took money to raise her from her biological parents, which is reminiscent of when Heaven's father sold the kids, except in reverse, because money was given to poor people to raise a rich child, for stupid reasons that will later be revealed.

Dawn's biological mother is a duplicate of "Dark Angel's" Jillian, Heaven's maternal grandmother, whose shallow obsession with her own beauty makes her a ridiculous character. Like both Dawn and Heaven, Dawn finds out she is actually part of some insanely wealthy family that lives in an enormous estate that has a name. (This is also like Audrina, actually. Do you know anyone whose house has a name? Me neither, and I've met a lot of rich people. But that was always something fun V.C. did that Niederman continues. Very Gone With the Wind).

Anyway, as you can tell from all this convoluted nonsense this is a ridiculous book with an undeveloped character. But that's just my opinion!

The beginning of the Cutler series was great all the way up to Midnight Whispers, however, they start getting repetitive. Like everybody's behavior is the same (drunks, incest, people talking to themselves, someone has a baby with a relative who isn't really a relative).

The rest of the Cutler series become predictable. Incidentally, though, V.C. Andrews created masterpieces. Even though I could tell what might happen next, or was perturbed by the behavior of a character, I enjoyed reading the stories.

I'm an avid V.C. Andrews reader. I'm glad her relatives have kept up with the style of writing that V.C. Andrews started.

That was the first novel I read of the V.C. Andrews collection. I remember I had told my friend once how do you read so many books and such long ones in such a short period of time cause I have a problem with reading long books cause they can get boring, but when she told me about the book she had been reading called "Dawn" that she was so into the book that she couldn't put it down it was good. So I decided to check it out for myself so I did and I couldn't put it down neither it was so sad at the begining that it made me cry cause they were very poor and always moving and losing friends, and then it made me feel happy for Dawn and Jimmy that they had maybe found a better life maybe and that Dawn had fallen in love with Phillip and him with her, but then it became sad again when she found out the truth about everything her family, her boyfriend her whole life was just turned all around as if she was never meant to be happy in her life I felt so bad for her even though it was just a book it made me feel something inside it made me feel thankful that I have a good life even though I have problems I am thankful for what I've got.Then I read the rest of the "Dawn" series they were really good books also I really enjoyed reading about Dawn and I think it would make a great movie cause it is very emotional sad, but yet exciting I thought the book was great.