I like to imagine that Emma is the highest-paid domestic worker in California, with full health and dental and paid holidays and a personal vehicle-anything to keep her from going to the papers. Jory arrives home where the family housekeeper Emma is preparing dinner. This is pointing to psychological subterfuge of My Sweet Audrina levels. I'm more interested that he seems to have forgotten that Chris is Cathy's biological brother, even though he would have been seven when they married and it was pretty well established until then that Chris was Cathy's brother rather than Paul's. Jory has a few warm memories of Bart Winslow, so I guess he's successfully repressed the whole walking-in-on-the-aftermath-of-his-mom's rape thing, but he's never made the connection between Bart Winslow and the fact that his brother's named Bart Winslow Sheffield. They also visit the graves of Cathy's dead family and her late husbands. Man, their fake family tree is almost as confusing as their real one.Įvery summer, the family travels back East to visit Jory's biological grandmother, Madame Marisha-yay! Madame's still kicking!-as well as Chris's mother, who lives in a mental hospital. When Paul died, Cathy married his younger brother Chris. His mother later married Paul Sheffield, with whom she had Bart. Jory's real father was a world-famous ballet star who died before Jory was born. She and her sister Carrie were adopted by Paul Sheffield.
We get the Official Fiction of Jory's genealogy: his mother's parents both died when she was sixteen. The road is long enough for Jory to hash out the entire backstory of the past seven years.
His house is at the end of a long winding road with no other houses save for an abandoned mansion next door. Jory Sheffield, age fourteen, is on his way home from school. Our story begins with a particularly rambling prologue by Cathy, so we're going to skip it and get to the goods. If I make a giant mistake with the psych stuff, please call me out on it. While I do have some background in psychology, I am not qualified or licensed to make diagnoses, even for fictional characters. There is nothing like labeling a character generic "crazy" to make me start analyzing. Probably a much bigger issue is that the word "crazy" as applied to mental illness gets bantered around very casually. I legitimately try to laud the positive aspects of the books when I stumble across them, but Petals was a long, hard slog for me and by the time I reached that fuck-you-I-ain't-gotta-explain-shit ending, I'd pretty much given up on redemption. I'm so pleased, but also slightly relieved, because I found myself saying uncharacteristically positive things about this book and I was afraid people would think the Andrews estate had sent me a nasty letter or something. Since posting the Prelude, the If There Be Thorns fans came out of the woodwork.
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