by Mary Beougher

Created on: August 10, 2010

Dark Angel by V.C. Andrews is the second of five novels belonging to the Casteel series. It is also the last book confirmed to actually be written by Virginia before her death from breast cancer on December 19, 1986. This series follows Heaven Leigh Casteel from a young girl to a grown woman through the first three novels, with the fourth from the perspective of her daughter and the fifth from the perspective of her mother.

The Casteel series set the trend that ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman followed for the next several series to come, with the second book being the one where our heroine embraces her lost heritage, usually a rags-to-riches story, with her “real” family being members of high society. It is usually determined early that this life is nothing like the one she imagined during her often extremely poor beginnings. Heaven’s struggles in Dark Angel mirror the struggles of any young girl growing into a woman, but they are amplified by the wealth that surrounds her and the shadows that hold the promise of kept secrets.

Dark Angel begins with Heaven fully embracing the world of wealth and privilege that is her birthright via her deceased mother, and dreaming that she can use this world to better the lives of those she loves. However, her grandparents, Jillian and Tony Tatterton are nothing like she expects. Jillian is obsessed with her youth and looks and instead of warmly embracing a grand-daughter, she insists that none of her society friends know their real relationship and asks Heaven to call her by her given name. Initially, Tony seems much warmer and inviting, but soon his true nature comes through when he traps Heaven into making a deal where in exchange for a top rate education and given everything she might need, she swears obedience to him and must cut off all contact with her former life. At first, she is dismayed by this, but she also immediately plots to circumvent his wishes.

Tony enrolls Heaven in Winterhaven, a prestigious girls boarding school. Almost immediately, she encounters contempt and envy as the others girls shun her due to the excessive wealth of the Tatterton family and the clothes that Tony has chosen for her being out of the current fashion of the others girls. The other girls begin a routine of tormenting Heaven that culminates in a horrible joke played on her the night of a co-ed dance. She emerges from her ordeal stronger, while maintaining an aloofness from the other students.

Despite her promise to cut

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