No I'm not usually a fan of the style of novels that Virginia Andrews writes and wouldn't particularly choose to read one of her books of my own accord. However for Christmas my parents bought me a somewhat large collection of her books and so I thought I'd give them a go. From the collection I decided that I would read the Landry Family Series first and so picked up the first book entitled 'Ruby' and got stuck in.

This story is in fact rather an intriguing one and I somehow found myself being drawn into the chapters and pulled along by the tale as it unfolded before my eyes. Now I wouldn't normally do this in a review but the novel itself is one that is not complex to follow but has a rather complexly intertwined plot that the wrong words could spoilt too easily and for this reason the plot summary I have given below is simply the blurb from the back of the book.

"The only family Ruby Landry has ever known are her loving grandparents. Although her mother is dead and she has never met her mysterious father, Ruby is grateful for all she has - especially when her attraction for handsome Paul Tate blossoms into love."

"But a glimpse of a faded photograph will change Ruby's life forever. Stunned by the shameful deception that has come to light and devastated by the subsequent death of her grandmother, Ruby is forced to seek out the father she has never known in his vast New Orleans mansion. There, in a house of lies, madness and cruel torment, Ruby clings to her memories of Paul to keep her spirit alive. For only their love can save her now..."

Like I have already said I would not normally simply regurgitate the blurb from the back of the book but in this case I do think that this is what captures the entire spirit of the book best and in this way I run no risk of running what the book is all about.

From the very beginning of this story Andrews ensures that the characters we read about are ones that feel empathetic towards. We feel that we know them all too well and in that way we can sympathise with them, argue with them and downright disagree with them from the very start of the novel. As a character Ruby is seemingly very simple to understand and comprehend but as the novel continues and the secrets unfold we come to realise that there is a lot more depth to her than we could have imagined.

Along the same lines the story also makes us believe at the beginning that it is going to be a very straightforward tale of poor girl coming good when she meets her rich father. Again this is not the exact case as the path to the end of the novel is one that involves many storyline streams that all feed to the final waterfall ending.

Andrews style of writing in this novel really brings the entire thing to life and at some moments when reading it I felt like it was all true life. I must however still admit that this fiction genre is not my favourite and at times I did feel that things were just running too smoothly and that some comments were a little too throw away. Despite this, completing this novel has made me slightly more enthusiastic about reading the others in the collection than I was before I began, which I suppose is always a good thing.

If this type of fiction is something you enjoy reading then this novel is definitely one you should read. If it isn't your sort of thing maybe you should give it a go anyway just to test the waters.