The Wildflowers series

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The Wildflowers is a series of short novels ghostwritten by Andrew Neiderman under the name V.C. Andrews. The Wildflowers are about a group of four teen girls in court ordered group therapy and why they were ordered to attend. The first four novels serve as prequels to the therapy sessions while the last deals with what happened after.

In the stories, they attend four group sessions in the home of therapist Dr. Marlowe, and they find through the four sessions that, while they come from very different lives, their shared hatred of their parents and their insecurities show they have more in common than they thought. The four girls eventually call themselves the 'OWPs' (Orphans With Parents).

The 'OWPs'[]

Misty[]

The first OWP, Misty, is a pretty teen girl who lives with her upper-middle-class beauty-obsessed mother in Beverly Hills. Her mother and father are divorced and constantly fight over alimony payments and other petty articles. Misty is quickly torn apart between them and the stress gets to her, especially when it comes to her overbearing mother. She begins dating Charles Allen, a rich, handsome boy from her school who tells her that his parents are also going through a divorce. After losing her virginity to him, Misty finds out that in fact Charles Allen was using her, and his parents were still together. Saddened, she breaks up with him.

Misty then meets Lloyd, a rebel whose parents really are divorced, and they fall in love. One day, Lloyd doesn't show up in school, and later he drops by Misty's house and asks her to run away with him on his motorcycle. She agrees despite the fact they have only a few dollars between them. On the way, Lloyd stops and asks Misty to stay outside while he goes into a gas station. Later, when a cop pulls them over, Misty learns Lloyd had robbed the store. When Misty told the police the stress over her parents' divorce was a cause that led her to run off, she was ordered to therapy with Dr. Marlowe.

Star[]

Star, a black girl from the poorer side of town, lived with her drunk mother and little brother Rodney (their father had walked out on them). Star's mother could barely hold down a job, and more often came home drunk with a new 'boyfriend,' while Star was left alone to care for her little brother.

Soon, Star's mother and one of her boyfriends decide to go find work elsewhere and 'come back' for Star and Rodney, and they are left with Star's grandmother, who is more of a mother figure to Star than her real mother ever was. Star's mother never returns. Star begins to date and eventually loses her virginity to a boy named Steve Gilmore who lives with his abusive father. One night after Star leaves, he is beaten into a coma by his father and eventually dies in the hospital. This is what sends Star into therapy.

Jade[]

Jade, ridiculed for being the richest of the four girls, lived with her divorced parents in the midst of a fierce custody battle for her. Feeling alone in the world, her parents more obsessed with their battles than with their daughter, Jade finds solace with a mysterious man in a chat room called 'Loneboy.' Eventually, Jade can't take her parents' divorce anymore, and she runs away to see this man, who reveals his name to be 'Craig.'

When she arrives on Craig's doorstep, she finds not a young man from the photo she was sent, but an older man who at first pretends to be Craig's father, but later locks Jade in a room and reveals that he is Craig, just older. He knocks Jade unconscious and ties Jade to the bed by her wrists and ankles and strips her naked (though she claims he never raped her but he did touch her). It takes Jade a whole day to escape, and she makes it home, where her parents are revealed to still not care. Jade's stress eventually takes over, and she swallows a whole bottle of sleeping pills, sending her to the hospital, and eventually into therapy.

Cat[]

Cathy (called Cat by Misty, and later, everyone else), a middle-class girl, lived under her mother Geraldine's strict moral code. She went through puberty very early, and grew breasts by the fifth grade, because of which Geraldine forced her to wear loose clothes and send her to a single-sex parochial school.

As a child Cat is frequently subject to sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Howard, but does not realize until later what had happened, instead believing that her father is really the only one who loved her. After being invited to a party by her friend Kelly, a group of boys trick Cat into getting drunk, and then fondle her in front of everyone else.

In high school, Cat tells her mother she wants to go to a school dance, but the dress she buys for her is terrible. Howard takes matters into his own hands and promises to 'teach' Cat about high school boys. This ends up being a thinly-veiled plan for him to have sex with her, which he does over the course of three lessons. Confused and upset by this, Cat eventually has a panic attack and is put in a psychiatric ward. After learning the reason for her daughter's panic attack, Geraldine divorces Howard, and Cat is put in therapy.

After telling her story, Cat learns that Geraldine is not her mother, but in fact her much older half-sister, and the woman she grew up believing to be her grandmother was really her mother, who became pregnant with her as the result of an affair with her younger brother-in-law.

Into the Garden[]

The final book, from Cat's point of view, brings the four young OWPs together after the therapy sessions are complete. Cat's half-sister turns up dead one morning, and Cat is faced with the constant pressures of living alone and the threat of her perverted adoptive father coming back to try and take her again. Jade, Misty, and Star help her bury Geraldine, because they fear Cat being shoved into foster care until she turns 18. Meanwhile, Misty deals with her father's remarriage to a much younger woman, and Star thinks she has found the man of her dreams, an army man named Larry.

All the while, Cat begins to learn more about her past through letters from her real mother stowed away in her attic along with relics. She was the product of her older mother's love affair and adopted by Geraldine through pressure and married to Howard the same way. Cat also finds a hidden safe full of cash and legal documents in Geraldine's old room as well as lingerie and pornography. Living with the secret of Geraldine's death and illegal burial eventually catches up with Cat, and Howard, her adoptive father, finds her and takes her away onto his houseboat. Misty, Star, and Jade are not left so much as a note.

On the houseboat, Howard is about to rape Cat again, who is rendered defenseless, as Howard has been spying on her all along and knows her secret about Geraldine. Howard reveals that he switched Geraldine's pain pills with cyanide tablets and was waiting until they killed her. Just as he is about to advance on Cat, Dr Marlowe, the police, and the three girls appear in time to save Cat.

Dr. Marlowe took Cat in herself until she came of age. Jade and Misty went to college, and Star married Larry right out of high school. The four of them still keep in touch.