Petals on the Wind

Petals on the Wind was published in 1980 and is the second of V. C. Andrews's Dollanganger novels, following Flowers in the Attic. It was a number one bestseller in North America in the early 1980s, like the rest of the series, and it was adapted into a television film in 2014. The novel was adapted as a Lifetime television film in 2014, and the sequence continues past this volume.

The novel is a revenge story wrapped around a family saga. Cathy, the narrator, is a teenager at the start and an adult by the end: she trains as a dancer, marries a doctor, and spends the book working out how to reach the mother who locked her children in an upstairs room and the grandmother who approved it. The book's gothic machinery is domestic rather than supernatural, and its shocks are about inheritance, sexuality and the way a family can decide that a child's life is an acceptable cost.

Andrews's series is set in Virginia and the novel treats the family house as the source of everything wrong with the family. The Dollanganger books were among the first mass-market paperbacks of their kind to sell in the millions to teenage readers, and they are usually bracketed with the other family-horror fiction of that decade. This is the second of five books about the same family, and it depends entirely on the first.