Petals on the Wind

This is another book that I read a while ago, actually it was before New Years. I was just to Flowers in the Attic) is her most popular, and while most people know the first book, Petals on the Wind its first sequel is not nearly as popular.

busy to write about it, and then sort of forgot about it until I found the novel when I was cleaning out my car. I was a huge VC Andrews fan in my youth. I read nearly everything of hers I could get my hands on, and in the days before eBooks and the popularity and ease of Amazon, getting multiple series with four plus books each meant I spend a lot of time in all sorts of book stores and yard sales. The Dollanganger series (

The story of Cathy, Chris and Carrie continues right where the horror of Flowers in the Attic leaves off. The three children are no longer just children, Chris in nearly an adult, Cathy should be in high school, and while Carrie looks and acts like a five year old she is much older. The three end up living with a widowed doctor, and in the grand tradition of VC Andrews and romance novels, the guardian ends up falling in love and having an affair with his under aged ward Cathy. Big sighs all around, along with a few “ewwws” and “gross.”

However, Cathy isn’t satisfied with the older doctor Paul and leaves him for the young dancer Julian without even breaking off her engagement to the doctor. After touring the world, and both Cathy and Julian having numerous affairs, Julian is killed in a motor vehicle accident leaving Cathy with mountains of debt, pregnant and alone.

After Julian’s death, Cathy becomes obsessed with destroying her mother, blaming her again for all the problems that she has encountered in her life. (Really, she made her own mistakes as an adult, but lets never move on from childhood trauma). She then moves with her baby and younger sister to the town her mother resides in. Only, her sister commits suicide by swallowing rat poisoning so that she can be with her twin brother who died over a decade before. Spends months seducing her mother’s new husband and then tells her mother all the sorted details of the affair in public. Her mother and lover are then burned to death in a fire that tears apart the entire building leaving ashes of the house the children were once held captive in.

Feeling like she finally got revenge on her mother and grandmother, Cathy moves back in with doctor Paul. The two marry and have a son, although Paul soon dies from heart problems (so, basically everyone that Cathy sleeps with dies at a very young age). After Paul’s death, she decides to marry her brother Chris, as the two have had an interesting sexual and loving past. They move out to California so that no one will know they were actually brother and sister, and then raise Cathy’s two children as their own.

Weird, yes. A typical VC Andrews romance novel, also Yes. These kind of novels tend to be a little addicting to read, and if you can get past the uggg and ewwww factor they can be great beach and sun bathing books.