A story about the only book I’ve ever thrown in the garbage.
A precocious 14-year-old girl had her friends over for a slumber party. As a game, they tried to rewrite Flowers in the Attic, set in the countryside of Georgian England, featuring Scarlett O’Hara. They stayed up all night, snuck some wine coolers and got drunk for the first time, had a contest about who could fit the most adjectives on a page, and ended up arguing because they couldn’t agree on verb tense, point of view or style. The next day they woke up with headaches and agreed to stay friends by including everything everyone had written, just to not hurt anyone’s feelings.
But they got bored, and quit. Their unfinished chapters were dropped on the floor and found by their 15-year-old brother, who picked them up and reassembled them in random order. He was having a bad day, so he rewrote the heroine to make her the most hateful, misogynistically-conceived and unsympathetic bitch he could imagine. Then he added salacious and violent sex scenes just to amuse himself. He realized he could fill in the plot holes by plagiarizing some of his mothers old Jackie Collins novels and . . .
. . . The resulting book was better than Wideacre.
(Widecare has 210 Amazon reviews, and SEVENTY of them are 1-star. Other people threw it in the garbage too, it wasn’t just me).
