Christopher reads “Tom Sawyer.” Cathy, the older sister, reads “Jude the Obscure” and “Wuthering Heights” and “Lorna Doone” and “King Arthur,” after which “a door opened I hadn’t known existed before: a beautiful world when knighthood was in flower.” She gets hooked on Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, and “anything that was dramatic, fanciful and fraught with tempestuous emotions.” Christopher is more a fan of Sherlock Holmes and medical manuals. The older siblings read “Peter Rabbit” to the twins.

He even makes a stirring speech to his siblings about how they now have “time to spare, hours to fill, a million books to read, time to let our imaginations take wing.” Honestly, he’s suspiciously upbeat on the subject.

When they’re first locked in the attic, Christopher, the hot blond brother, sees it as a clear opportunity given what avid readers they are. Not that the Dollanganger kids mind, exactly. Viewed from one perspective, it’s a tragic story of a years-long experiment with homeschooling gone horribly awry. But what I really didn’t remember was how little happens in “Flowers in the Attic.” Once the kids are trapped up there, all they do is read. I didn’t remember that there were two younger twin siblings, for instance, or the tar in the hair, or the whippings, or even that the rotten mother had trapped her kids in the attic until she could convince her rich father to re-inherit her. But, while I vividly recall flipping through “Flowers in the Attic” with a flashlight, late at night, the experience appears to have been traumatic, since I retained no memory of the book’s contents other than donuts powdered with arsenic. I’d skipped Judy Blume’s “Forever,” for instance, on the basis that all the jokes about Ralph were tacky. Given what a prim snob I was as a pre-teen reader, it’s amazing that I picked up any of Andrews’s books in the first place.

It’s the written analogue of an after-school special about the dangers of reading. (I have strange friends.) I was stunned to discover one theme I had forgotten: this isn’t really a book about incest after all, or even bad moms. But I did re-read the book recently, because a friend of mine was throwing a “Flowers in the Attic”-themed fundraising event. Andrews novel “Flowers in the Attic,” that gothic literary sensation of my youth, with its notorious, scary cut-out paperback cover and brother-sister incest plot. I haven’t yet watched Lifetime’s new adaptation of the V.

Flowers in the attic novel