This is some of the most beautiful writing I've ever encountered. It reminds me a little bit of Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. It's language is deep and satisfying. The mother daughter relationship told in an almost mythical way. Loved it!

Lasīju raidieraksta ietvaros, un ja ne šis uzdevums, diez vai kādreiz būtu pieķērusies.
Un būtu laupījusi sev kolosālu grāmatu.

Mani uzrunāja viss. Mātes un meitas sarežģītās attiecības. Sieviešu dažādās personības. Autores bagātīgā valoda. Traumu un dzīves pieredzes ekspresija dzejā un mākslā.

Perfekts balanss starp formu un saturu. Autore krāso ar diezgan biezām līnijām un nebaidās no stipriem vārdiem, radošiem salīdzinājumiem, diezgan dauzonīgi patiesībā, bet viņa arī māk izstāstīt aizraujošu stāstu, kurā prasmīgi savērpts sižets un iecerētie motīvi.

Iesaku! Ļoti spēcīga grāmata!

I am normally exceedingly wary of anything that Oprah puts her mark on and avoid it like the plague. However, after years of being recommended this book by many people who's opinions on such things I respect I finally pulled it off the bookshelf. Let me be the first to tell you: I have never been more appreciative of my friends. This book was phenomenal!

Following the trials and tribulations of one Astrid Magnusson, the book takes you first from her idyllic life with her poet/ice queen mother, Ingrid, to the various foster hells she is plunged into once her mother is imprisoned for the murder of a former lover. Finch writes astonishingly well and makes sure that the reader feels every hunger pang, every slap in the face, every demeaning detail right in the core of their being. I went into this book expecting a quick and melodramatic read. I came out deeply moved and with tears streaking my cheeks, not so much from the writing but from the thought that all of the hells that Astrid is subjected to in house after house are actually being experienced by children in foster care every day. Astrid's struggle highlights the existence that a vast amount of this nation's children live, and that is the most horrifying thing of all.

Due in part, perhaps, to the influx of "unfortunate teenage girl" novels in the mid-to-late nineties (I think here of books like _She's Come Undone_ and _The Virgin Suicides_), I avoided Fitch's book for a while (the Oprah's Book Club stigma also contributed). And while the story line did manage to keep me up and at it until 2 am last night, I must say: I'm unconvinced.

Also, spoilers. I don't review books to keep them a secret from people who haven't read them; I review them to share my opinions with people who have.

The heroine is a supposedly precocious 12?-year-old girl whose mother, jilted, murders her old lover using some pretty romantic and home-remedy style poisons. Astrid, the daughter, worships her mother based (as we find out later in a kind of tangental and almost unnecessary addition to the denouement) on some major abandonment issues. Her mother, Ingrid, a "poet", is wildly self-absorbed and disregards her daughter except when convenient. Fitch's job at the beginning was to show us Ingrid through Astrid's eyes, and while she does a decent job of alluding to some of the disillusionment that begins to blossom when we hit pre-adolescence, she never lays a real foundation for understanding or feeling of Astrid's desperate, almost hysterical attachment to her mother -- Astrid worships her mother's physicality (enormously sensual), her appreciation of aesthetics (somewhat Cali and cliche) and her poetry (just bad, actually).

After the murder, trial and subsequent imprisonment, Astrid is carted off to -- wait for it -- foster care! As the reader of any late 20th century novel knows well, this bodes the beginning of the "real" story. Because foster parents are all just terrible, messed-up people, either in it for the money or to fulfill some other need. Astrid trails destruction and debris through three or four various foster homes, developing complicated and doomed relationships along the way that only serve to reaffirm her abandonment complex. The only sympathetic person of color in the whole story -- a high-priced call girl named Olivia Johnstone who lives an impossibly rich life laced with jazz, jewelery and jet-setting -- establishes one of Astrid's oft-returned-to realities: "It's a man's world". And yet, Fitch riddles the female characters with so many intensely tragic flaws that halfway through the book one can't help but wonder if she's implying that women are too fucked up to make it a woman's world themselves. Each of the female role-models Astrid finds is almost a caricature of some fatal flaw: gluttony, hypocrisy, despair, lust, while the men remain either sensitive and helpless, or are acquitted of their manly appetites simply because they serve as a backdrop to the relationship between Astrid and the female...but if it's a man's world, and women act the way they do because of men, then why is it okay for the men remain unexamined?

Astrid learns the ropes, as the reader might expect, and in the end bargains with her mother to exchange her tweaked testimony (and potentially her mother's freedom) for tidbits about the past. By this time, so much has happened and Astrid has made so many streetwise decisions that it's difficult to see how the plumbing of the depths of her past (especially the whole thing about Annie...like, who cares? Whether Ingrid was there or not, Astrid was emotionally abandoned the whole time) will really resolve any of her conflict. The final result is simply that Astrid should probably see a therapist or five.

Final Pet Peeve: what's all this about California being a palpable presence in the novel? I won't deny that it was, but I've grown more and more conscious of the fact that there are two separate Californias and I have a hard time with LA authors who behave as though the only California is the California south of San Francisco. It just seems very short-sighted to me.

Magnificent.

Yes. Yes, I am about to pull a basic reader b move by starting off a book review with self-centered commentary on the movie version, but what can I say?

I'm a basic b.

But anyway.

I saw this movie when it came out it 2002. And I loved it. I was 19 or 20 years old at the time and I just absolutely adored this thing. Everything about it. Even Alison Lohman's atrocious wigs didn't get me down. It started my love affair with Cole Hauser. It made me want to name any future child I had "Astrid," regardless of their gender.



It made me want to sink inside of Michelle Pfeiffer's skin and experience what it's like to be that fucking beautiful for just one day.

I've always been captivated by her as an actress (and let's be honest, her flawless ethereal beauty); but, in this movie, I was also endlessly fascinated by her character. Her passion. Her complexity. Her viciousness. Her powers of manipulation.



Her relationship with and hold on Astrid was also captivating. The way she reacted to Astrid's relationship with Claire...So counter cultural from what one would expect from a "good" mother.

I just loved it. All of the female characters in the movie as a whole. Everything. Even Rena.



However, at that time in my life, I was in college. And pretty much still only read class material, romance novels, or the scoreboard of a sports field. So I never even thought about reading this book, I just watched and re-watched the movie on VHS.

Fast forward 19 years (which was accompanied by an evolution in my reading tastes) and add in me seeing this listed in another reviewer's top five ever books...which, as all us true readers know, is super high praise indeed. So, since the idea of reading this book was always niggling in the back of my mind anyway, I randomly decided to snag this last week and see how it panned out for me.

All I can say is, this is one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. Fitch's prose was just mesmerizing. And from someone who doesn't usually like "purple prose" or poetry all that much, that's really saying something.

Also, being that I was raised and currently live on the outskirts of LA, I also really enjoyed the way Los Angeles and its white oleanders and Fairfax heat played a veritable character of its own here.

Mostly though, I think I just loved Ingrid. And Claire. Oddly enough, I related to both of them so much. Like two sides of the same coin. And as ruthless and seemingly heartless as Ingrid is, there is beauty in her brutal honesty, in her unwillingness to compromise. I think we can all remember a time where we thought some of the things she was willing to say out loud.

Everything I loved about the movie felt more distilled in the book - I mean, that's usually the case, right? And I loved it.

***spoilers***

I liked that Ingrid was a poet in the book, instead of an artist as she was in the movie. I loved the way her words and writing and letters accomplished their own goals.

I will say, however, that I actually prefer the way the movie ends to the way the book ends. The way in which Ingrid allows Astrid to opt out.



The way Astrid is seemingly happy wherever she is with Paul Trout.

The book is messier.
The book isn't a clear cut HEA.
The book isn't that perfect Claire on stage.

But then again, I guess that was kind of the point, wasn't it?

My goal wasn't to make this "review" the compare/contrast of the book and movie that it ended up being, so my apologies on that front; however, it would have been impossible for me to have read this book through any other lens, being that this is one of my all time favorite movies.

That said, it's now one of my all time favorite books.

My aunt bought me this book for Christmas one year and at first I was really disappointed. I thought "Oh, that's nice... because I like to read you just got me the Oprah book club book of the month... thanks." But then I read it, and I'm now convinced that my aunt knows me better than maybe many of my close friends or better than I know myself. Not to be all cheesy and over-identify with something that isn't about me; but this book REALLY hit home for me in describing my relationship with my mother. This story is emotionally harrowing and beautifully told. The climax is gut-wrenching though subtle, and honestly made me cry. The movie didn't come close to doing any of this justice. This is one of those books that even if you had great parents, you can probably identify with, just because of how excellently the characters and story are rendered, and it's hard to believe that this author didn't live through anything like this herself. She makes a special point of noting in the preface (or back cover or something) that her and her mother get along great and are very close; to me that just makes this book more amazing because, well, damn. That's some powerful and realistic fiction.

This is my all time favorite book. I love the character Astrid, and enjoyed seeing her played by Alison Lohman in the movie. I wish there were more books like this one.

In the early 2000’s I was reading lots of books from the public library. I read all kinds of fiction. I read a lot of crap. Books I can’t even mention, and so many I can’t remember. Ah, but I remembered White Oleander all these years. Fourteen, to be precise. How I thought about this book at the most random and crazy times. How I thought about that beautiful writing through the years. I knew I needed to read it again.

The time has come and gone and I’ve read White Oleander again.
I should have known better than just to think that perhaps I was too young and easily impressed (especially in the middle of that crap I was reading) and this book couldn’t be that good, could it?

I read it slowly. I savoured every word. I played every scene in my head. I realised it wasn’t that good, it was better than before!!

I’m not even going to attempt and write about the story. This was bigger than Life.

All these years and I didn’t know it was Love.

Now I know.

This is Astrid’s story.

We meet her first when she is twelve and in Ingrid’s (her mother) care.

Ingrid is a woman of such rare, unearthly beauty as to be most likely found in dreams.

Fitch describes her through Astrid’s eyes, gradually, poetically, using very sparse language, as the story unfolds, with words that sing, the pages glistening with the image reflected from her eyes.

The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shrivelling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blossoms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blonde hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.

I sat next to her, and we stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand. The edge of her white kimono flapped open in the wind and I could see her breast, low and full. Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.

Ingrid also covets beauty in all its many forms.

Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren’t, you just didn’t exist. She had drummed it into my head since I was small.

She becomes so wrapped up in her own world, her own needs that Astrid’s no longer filter through.

We swam in the hot aquamarine of the pool, late at night, in the clatter of palms and the twinkle of the new-scoured sky. My mother floated on her back, humming to herself. “God, I love this." She splashed gently with her fingers, letting her body drift in a slow circle. "Isn't it funny. I am enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is tempermental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind.” Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. “But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It's so soothing."

When Ingrid is imprisoned Astrid is fostered out to a series of homes in Los Angeles, her mother, an ever present part of the baggage that she carries with her.

This is such a beautifully written story. So simple, the words arranged to please the ear, one after the other, melodic in their cadence and rhythm. But Astrid’s is not a pretty story.

I gave her to the quiet boy with short cropped hair and straggly beard, followed the fat boy back into the bushes behind the bathrooms. He unbuckled his pants, pushed them down over his hips. I knelt on a bed of pine needles, like a supplicant, like a sinner. Not like a lover. He leaned against the white stucco wall of the bathroom as I prayed with him in my mouth, his hands in my hair.

It is too real, too raw, to conform to anyone’s preconceived notion of beauty. And yet Fitch makes it sing, with her beautiful, simple words.

I left walking backwards so I wouldn’t miss a moment of her. I hated the idea of going back to Marvel’s, so I walked around the block, feeling Olivia's arms around me, my nose full of perfume and the smell of her skin, my head swirling with what I had seen and heard in the house, so much like ours, and yet not at all. And I realised as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.

As I read this I became overwhelmed with the number of passages that I wanted to secrete away, to take out, and read again. Perhaps that explained the worn and tattered condition of the book I held within my hands, pages yellowing, stained and dog-eared or soiled in some other way by the fingers of less careful readers.

Truly (I have done it several times now) I can let this fall open to any page and find one of these passages.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.


Don’t miss a word……..read this one for yourselves.

“How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean? I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost, more easily than anyone could imagine.”

Twelve-year-old Astrid Magnussen spends six years of her life in and out of foster homes (six foster homes and a state-funded home for those “returned”) after her selfish, manipulative mother, Ingrid, a free-spirited poet, is sent to jail for killing her lover.

Astrid’s feelings for her mother are conflicted. While her memories often take her back to happier times spent with her mother, Astrid cannot help but blame her mother for her present state and all the pain she has had to endure. In intermittent letters and the few visits with her mother in prison, Astrid recognizes her mother’s inability and unwillingness to comprehend the impact her actions have had on Astrid, to the extent that her cellmate wrote to Astrid telling her to only share happier moments in her letters as reading about Astrid’s difficulties makes her mother sad. Ingrid initially does not come across as repentant while sharing her accomplishments as a poet with her daughter, her poems being published and circulated while in jail, “a jail-house Plath“, also gaining a strong and sympathetic following in the outside world. Her response to her daughter’s hardships is for the most part devoid of compassion or concern and her biting wisdom borders on cruel , especially considering that she is writing her own child who has had her life and dreams taken away from her for no fault of her own.

“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”

“You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest—where you want to erect a museum. Don’t hoard the past, Astrid. Don’t cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.”

Over the next six years, Astrid’s life is a kaleidoscope of loneliness, rejection, negligence, jealousy, violence and inappropriate sexual relationships tempered with a few moments of kindness and kinship– moments, relationships, and hopes that never seem to stick, only adding to her misery and her sense of abandonment and loss.

“How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention. I promised myself that when she returned, I would stay away, I would learn to be alone, it was better than the disappointment when you found it out anyway. Loneliness was the human condition, I had to get used to it.”

As the narrative progresses, Astrid grows and learns from her experiences. In the process of understanding and interpreting the world around her she channels her energy and emotions into her own creative pursuits. Though she learns to harden her heart, she does not completely lose herself, as we see in how she interacts with fellow foster students and how in her own way, though not quite in the manner she had hoped, she tries to find her place in the world. In her journey of self-discovery she also comes to terms with how she truly feels about her mother.

“I hated my mother but I craved her.”

Janet Fitch’s White Oleander paints a heart-wrenching picture of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. The white oleander flower, while of particular significance as a plot point in the beginning of the novel, is also symbolically woven into the narrative as it manifests-both in its beauty and its toxicity- in the human relationships so vividly described in this story. Written in 1999, this is the kind of novel that stands the test of time. Dark and depressing (some content might be disturbing for readers) but so beautifully written that it holds you in its thrall- the kind of story that stays with you. This is so much more than a coming-of-age story. With its brilliantly poetic and powerful writing, fluid narrative and memorable characters Janet Fitch’s "White Oleander" is a modern masterpiece. I hadn’t watched the movie because I wanted to read the book first. I might pass on the movie but will definitely revisit this book in the future.

“Nobody took me away, Mother. My hand never slipped from your grasp. That wasn’t how it went down. I was more like a car you’d parked while drunk, then couldn’t remember where you’d left it. You looked away for seventeen years and when you looked back, I was a woman you didn’t recognize. So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who’d lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet’s sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good. Someday I’d read it all in a poem for the New Yorker.”

This was a masterful yarn about a complex relationship between mother and daughter. It was about the loss of self, the journey of finding oneself, and most importantly - the resilience of the human spirit. This wasn't a tale of any ordinary bond between mother and daughter, this was a story of the severe dysfunction that occurs when a mother, Ingrid, is imprisoned for murder and a daughter, Astrid, is passed around like garbage from one foster home to another. This novel explores the intricacies of their relationship. It explores the depth of emotion that Astrid feels toward Ingrid, ranging from obsessive love to all-encompassing hatred.

Janet Fitch is not just a storyteller. She is like Calliope, the Greek Muse of epic poetry. Fitch spins letters into gold; every word that she chooses is deliberate and precise. When you read a book by Fitch it is an experience to savor; letting the story wash over your soul in warm, gentle waves. Once complete, you will feel emotionally exhausted, yet wholly renewed. I urge you to experience this book in all of its glory; it is not just a book. It is every child that has been mistreated in a foster home. It is their voice. It is their tears. It is hope.

This story is so beautifully written that you can almost forget how disturbing the storyline is / becomes.