If There Be Thorns

If There Be Thorns is a novel by the American writer Virginia C. Andrews, published in 1981. It is the third book in the Dollanganger series.

The story takes place in 1982, and it is narrated by the two half-brothers, Jory and Bart Sheffield. Jory is a handsome and talented fourteen-year-old who wants to follow his mother Cathy in her career in the ballet, while nine-year-old Bart, who sees himself as plain and clumsy, feels inferior to his brother and spends his time in a world of pretend, often covering up the bad things he does with fantasies he creates. Bart also has congenital analgesia, which means that he cannot feel pain, putting him at serious risk of injury or of death by infection. By this point in the series Cathy and Chris are living together as husband and wife, and to conceal their history they tell the boys and everybody else that Chris was the younger brother of a man named Paul. Cathy is a loving mother to her sons, and the novel is told from inside two very different understandings of the household the boys are growing up in.

Andrews wrote the Dollanganger books as a family saga built on secrets and a locked room, and this third volume moves the story on to the children of the original pair.