Two Disturbingly Popular Book Series
Jun. 14th, 2003 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldV.C. Andrews's line of novels easily qualify as the worst of the two. From reading the lurid backs of the too many paperbacks and hardcovers published using the Andrews name (she died a couple of decades ago, but corporate hacks have continued the line), and--yes, I admit--glancing inside a few when shelving, the plot lines tend to be fairly consistent: An innocent adolescent girl or young woman, raised in a poor yet kind family either in the rural South (often Cajun) or in an urban slum, is taken in by her rich but distant relatives in a luxurious urban household. In their environment, she is psychologically or sexually tortured, often incestuously, as her relatives egg on the torturers. She ends up abandoning this poisonous environment for the pure city, and bravely rebuilds a new poor but pure life on her own.
Lurlene McDaniel's books are rather less bizarrely offensive than those authored in Andrews' name, though mainly because they are boringly conventional. The protagonists are all teenagers--mainly female--who suffer through major medical crises, largely disease with a few car accidents thrown in. As they recover from their problems (or prepare to recover, in the McDaniel books which involve transplants of hard-to-locate organs or dangerous operations), they come to grips with their personality flaws, largely related to an insufficient belief on their part in the healing power of belief in God. They rediscover this belief, of course.
These books aren't the worst things to be found in the library, and perhaps I'm being snobbish. I freely admit, though, that the gory psychosexual horror of Andrews' books and the believe-in-God pablum spooned in alongside major medical problems that characterize McDaniel's appals me as a reader. Why can't literature aimed at popular audiences be better?
Lurlene McDaniel's books are rather less bizarrely offensive than those authored in Andrews' name, though mainly because they are boringly conventional. The protagonists are all teenagers--mainly female--who suffer through major medical crises, largely disease with a few car accidents thrown in. As they recover from their problems (or prepare to recover, in the McDaniel books which involve transplants of hard-to-locate organs or dangerous operations), they come to grips with their personality flaws, largely related to an insufficient belief on their part in the healing power of belief in God. They rediscover this belief, of course.
These books aren't the worst things to be found in the library, and perhaps I'm being snobbish. I freely admit, though, that the gory psychosexual horror of Andrews' books and the believe-in-God pablum spooned in alongside major medical problems that characterize McDaniel's appals me as a reader. Why can't literature aimed at popular audiences be better?
