Rain

Virginia Andrews - Rain

Book #1 Hudson Family series 

Growing up in the ghettos of Washington, D.C., the cards are stacked against a hardworking dreamer like Rain Arnold. Rain has fought to be the best daughter she can: she studies hard and gets good grades; she helps her mother cook and clean. And unlike her defiant younger sister, she avoids the dangers of the city streets as if her life depends on it... and it does. But Rain can't suppress the feeling that she has never truly fit in, that she is a stranger in her own world. Then one fateful night, Rain overhears something she shouldn't: a heartbreaking revelation from the past, a long-buried secret that is about to change her life in ways she never could have imagined. In the blink of an eye, everything Rain has ever known -- the family she has loved and the familiar place she has called home -- is left behind, and Rain is sent to live with total strangers, the wealthy Hudson family. But just as she did not belong to the troubled world she was raised in, Rain is also out of place in this realm of luxury and privilege. With nowhere to turn, Rain finds an escape in the theater, inside the walls of an exclusive private school. But will it be enough to fulfill her heart's deepest wish -- and give her a place to call home? 

About Virginia Andrews 

Virginia helped to support her family through her extremely successful career as a commercial artist, portrait painter, and fashion illustrator. Frustrated with the lack of creative satisfaction that her work provided, Virginia sought creative release through writing, which she did in secret. Her first manuscript was so autobiographical that she destroyed it in order to keep her life private. In 1972, she completed her first novel, The Gods of the Green Mountain [sic], a science-fantasy story. Between 1972 and 1979, she wrote nine novels and twenty short stories. According to this pitch letter, she sold three Gothic Romances on her own, under a pen name and without an agent, and before that she wrote confession stories. One of her confession stories, "I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night", was published in an unknown pulp confession magazine.Promise gleamed over the horizon for Virginia when she submitted a 290,000-word novel, The Obsessed, to a publishing company. She was told that the story had potential, but needed to be trimmed and spiced up a bit. She drafted a new outline in a single night and added "unspeakable things my mother didn't want me to write about." The ninety-eight-page revision was re-titled Flowers in the Attic. Virginia C. Andrews died on the 19th of December, 1986, after being diagnosed with breast cancer. She was 62 years old.She had over 24 million books in print and her books were translated into Dutch, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Turkish.A public letter written by the Andrews family revealed that the family was "working closely with a carefully selected writer" to expand and continue the story-telling genius of V.C. Andrews. The identity of this writer had been kept a secret from the general public at the request of the Andrews family for years, but it's hard to hold on to a secret that big. The ghostwriter has since been identified as horror novelist Andrew Neiderman.