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.

Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews

I personally think the Flowers in the Attic gets a bad rap. Whenever I have mentioned I've read it, or how I am excited about the new movie lifetime is making, I get odd looks and snarls, comments of how all that book is about is brother/sister incest. Well I have news people, it's not. Yes, there is a moment with Christopher and Cathy but it is horrible for both of them. I read this book the first time when I was a sophomore in high school and went on a year long bender on all things VC Andrews. This series is still my favorite though.

After the death of their father, Cathy’s mother takes her four kids to their grandparents house. Grandparents who haven’t spoken to their daughter Corrine since she ran away with her husband, they don’t even know about their four grandchildren. When they show up, their grandmother locks them in the attic.

There mother comes to visit them, telling them that she just needs to make up with her father first, then they can all live in luxury. After all, her parents are loaded. She promises it will only be for a few days. And what is a few days when a huge fortune is at stake?

But a few days turns into weeks, into months, and now its been years the four children have been locked in the attic. Cathy and Christopher aren’t children any more, but teens with needs and desires they don’t understand. The two young twins have only grown an inch in over two years, their limbs are weak and their heads are unproportionate. Their mother’s visits have become fewer and far between. It seems almost as if she no longer loves them, that she’s moving on with her rich life.

Then little Cory dies, and their mother shows almost no remorse over the death of her youngest, who had doesn’t the last two years trapped in a small space. Something is very wrong, Cathy and Christopher know that they need to do something to get out and save Carrie before she to dies. But things below their attack are not as they appear, and Cathy is on the brink of discovering something terrible.