Derek Frick wanted to be a rockstar. Derek won that one. Luck and sales in the millions came Butterfish’s way, and Derek lived the rock dream to the max, with Curtis on keyboards, just holding on. It was a relief, really, when the third album tanked and Butterfish imploded, letting Curtis escape back to Brisbane, to a home studio where he could produce other people’s music away from the glare of the spotlight. When Annaliese Winter walks down his driveway, Curtis is ill-prepared for a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who’s a confounding mixture of adult and child. He isn’t at all ready, either, to find himself drawn to the remarkably unremarkable family next door. To Kate, Annaliese’s mother, who’s curvy in a way that’s sometimes unfashionable and sometimes as good as it gets. Even to fourteen-year-old Mark, at war with his own surging adolescence. But Curtis has to work himself out before he can bring anything positive to the lives of the Winter family, and Annaliese makes it all the more complicated when she begins to show too much interest in him.
