Wildflowers
Peggy Frew
Wildflowers
Peggy Frew
‘They were still who they always had been, still those sisters, but on this afternoon, in this car, driving with the windows down between cane fields under a deepening sky with purple cut-out mountains in the distance, they were wearing it so lightly, their bossiness and flakiness and wildness, they were wearing it like they used to, like it was supple, slippery, not completely fixed. Like it could be taken off.’
‘In the car Meg had been laughing too. Meg and Amber laughing in the front and Nina in the back hiding secret tears of hope behind her sunglasses. They had been close then, the three of them, together in that moment of lightness…’
Meg and Nina have been outshone by their younger sister Amber since childhood. They have become used to living on the margins of their parents’ interest, used to others turning away from them and towards charismatic Amber.
But Amber’s life has not gone the way they all thought it would and now the three of them are together for the first time in years, on the road to a remote holiday rental in Far North Queensland, where Meg and Nina plan on helping Amber overcome her addiction. As good intentions gradually become terrifying reality, these sisters will test the limits of love and the line between care and control.
Review
Tye Cattanach
Sisters. They can be the strongest of allies, the fiercest of enemies. In her latest novel, Wildflowers, Peggy Frew delves, with startlingly precise detail, deep into the fraught history and heartbreaking present of three girls born to Robert and Gwen Atkins.
Each girl has their assigned role within the family, informed by personality traits identified (or perhaps bestowed upon them) by their loving but frustratingly benign parents. Meg is the eldest, the fixer, the bossy one. Nina, the directionless ditherer who cannot articulate even to herself what she wants, has seemingly resigned herself to being the quiet, well-behaved one. Amber is the youngest, a beautiful, fierce, gloriously vivid chameleon and born actress, who plunges ardently into life and all its risks. It is Amber’s insatiable need to live her life large and loud that holds the rest of the family captive, no more so than when her descent into a heroin addiction begins to control not only her life, but all of their lives.
Frew has a singular, remarkable gift for writing human emotion; her characters live and breathe beyond the page. My heart ached for each and every one of them. Here is a group of people shaped by events beyond what may or may not have been within their power to control. It is left to us the readers to ponder, what would we have done? How far is too far to try and save those you love?
It seems to me that throughout the span of human history, there are few relationships more examined than the one between sisters. Bookstores everywhere contain multitudes of tomes dedicated to exploring the complex fragility and enormous resilience of the bond shared between girls born into the same families. Frew has done an exceptional job of ensuring her own novel glows like a gem among them.
Tye Cattanach is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
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