Melody

Virginia Andrews - Melody

Book #1 Logan Family series 

Melody Logan knew her beautiful mother, Haille, was unhappy in their hardscrabble mining town.... But with her wonderful father's unwavering love, Melody always felt safe -- until a dreadful mine accident ripped her from her family's moorings. She was still devastated by her father's death when she left West Virginia with Haille to follow her mother's dream of becoming a model or actress. But first they stopped in Cape Cod to visit her father's family at last. Melody knew only that her grandparents had disowned their son when he married Haille -- just because she was an orphan, her mother said. Yet moments after Melody first laid eyes on dour, Bible-spouting Uncle Jacob, nervous Aunt Sara, and her cousins -- handsome Cary, whose twin, Laura had been killed recently in a sailing accident, and sweet, deaf little May -- Haille announced that Melody was to live with them. Sleeping in Laura's old room, Melody was awash in a sea of grief and confusion, with only her beloved fiddle to comfort her. Then Cary revealed the truth he's gleaned about her parents -- a sad, shocking story that only puzzled her more. Melody knew nothing of the dark deceptions that would soon surface... the devastating betrayals she would face before she glimpsed the faint, beckoning lights of a safe harbor.... 

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.