3.5 Stars
This is a powerful piece of literary fiction with heavy focus on the characters. This is not quite my usual type of story but it was a very moving story playing with the theme of difficult families… which is one of my favourite themes. I would recommend to readers who enjoy literary stories about messy families.

Ik las dit boek toen ik 15 was (20 jaar geleden

Instaclassic. Review to follow.
I saw this as a film first and it was astonishing. Afterwards I discovered there is a book on which the film was based. And the book was even better, due to its beautiful language and poetic delivery.

This is what they call POETIC!

Dark, depressing, disturbing, and so beautiful! It’s so well written, the lyrical quality of the prose is just extraordinary in my mind. A blissful read.

White Oleander is one of those books I read at just the right time in my teenage years and that always stuck with me—to the point that I was a little afraid of revisiting it, fearing that it would have lost its magic in the intervening years (after all, another such impactful book was n  The Shadow of the Windn, which, as I discovered a few years ago, hasn’t aged well at all). My worn, yellowed, and well-loved paperback copy bears witness to my teenage angst, with many underlined passages about temperamental love and loneliness being the human condition; I was clearly going through some emotional upheaval when I first read it, crawling out the other side from my first heartbreak, and the quotes that resonated with me then, were, without fail, all uttered by a cold, self-centered and manipulative poetess locked away for murder after having poisoned the lover who dared to leave her. Isn’t everything so raw and melodramatic when you’re a teenager?

n  “Let me tell you a few things about regret… There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”n

Astrid, our narrator, enters the foster care system aged twelve, following her mother’s crime of passion, and spends the rest of the years until she comes of age being shuffled from one foster home to the next, each filled with vibrant characters with their own struggles and insecurities. The language reflects her being the daughter of a poet—a beautiful woman who was the sun around which her whole universe revolved—and is flowery and beautiful even when describing the ugliest things, and even when she is progressively disillusioned as the years march on; she is a child forced to grow up fast, and the hard way. The theme of motherhood is ever-present, of course, but many others are touched on; beauty, the healing power of art, self-reflection, and resilience.

Since we see everything through Astrid’s eyes, some of the appalling things that happen to her seem to be almost romanticized on the surface, but the creepiness of them still shines through between the lines, and make the reader rightly squirm; a good example is her sexual relationship, at age fourteen, with a middle-aged man. Her biggest struggle is finding her own identity, separate from her mother’s, so she latches on to any woman she thinks she can learn from, fiercely determined to survive the system, and arousing her jailed mother’s jealousy, who never much cared for Astrid when she had her freedom, but is now trying to control and mold her from prison.

n  “A future wasn’t something I could forge by myself out of all these broken pieces I had, like Siegfried’s sword in the old story. The future was a white fog into which I would vanish, unmarked by the flourish of rustling taffeta blue and gold. No mother to guide me.”n

This novel is a poem; Fitch paints a bleak picture of a harsh world with pretty words that flow beautifully, but inexorably, like the lulling sound of a thunderous waterfall over a sheer cliff. Some would call it overwrought, and they may be right, but I was charmed by it after a few chapters—California, especially L.A., spring to life through Fitch’s prose, and I thought I could smell the blooming jacaranda trees. My biggest fear was that White Oleander would read like a Lifetime movie in novel form to my adult mind—a plot advanced by tragedies that ring hollow—but the author does a great job at masking what would be exaggerated melodrama in the hands of most others. Some of Astrid’s circumstances are extreme, but none of it—plot, characters, or their thoughts and actions—ever rang false to me. It’s a stunning debut novel about the complex and often frayed relationships between mothers and daughters, told in an almost mythical, archetypal way. I’m glad to say that it held up, and I recommend it to anyone who loves stories about complicated and dysfunctional family dynamics; it’s in turn dark, disturbing, and depressing, but oh so beautiful.

"- Estamos na altura dos aloendros - disse ela. - Os amantes que agora se matam uns aos outros porão as culpas no vento."

"O bolo trazia uma vela mágica que não se apagava, portanto, não tive oportunidade de formular o meu desejo. Que era exactamente que fosse sempre assim, que a minha vida pudesse ser uma festa só para mim."

"Fiquei a vê-la durante algum tempo, fixando a imagem dos ombros dela, o seu porte altivo. Era assim que as raparigas se iam embora. Faziam as malas e saíam de saltos altos. Faziam de conta que não estavam a chorar e que não era o pior dia da vida delas. Que não queriam que as mães viessem a correr atrás delas, implorando-lhes perdão. Que elas próprias não se ajoelhariam e agradeceriam a Deus, se pudessem ficar."

i need a cigarette right about now. so fucking poetic, dark, and human.

This is the first coming of age story I can recall reading that's centred around extremely unlikeable characters. Thankfully, they were all written in an interesting, fucked up and complex way.

Astrid and Ingrid were both terrible but in the most engrossing way possible. Astrid wasn't quite as bad a person as her mother but she came close with her selfish, obsessive, weird and destructive personality, her daddy/foster daddy issues were especially disturbing. Then again, her sort of foster fathers were such pervs and Astrid's actions under the circumstances made sense in a sick sort of way.

I loathed Ingrid, she was a self-centred, up herself, pretentious, hard faced cow. Worst of all was her treatment of Astrid, she fucked her up good, all she did was ignore her or use her or control her and occasionally obsess over her life when it suited her. Even though Astrid was a total nutter for most of the story it was much easier to forgive her faults because of her age and her having Ingrid as a mother, and her foster parents didn't help in any way either.

Astrid's foster parents were rubbish, the worst were Starr and Amelia. I don't know why Starr blamed 14 year old Astrid for the affair she had with her almost 50 year old boyfriend. Ray was a total pervert, and all the fault lay with him. Astrid was a messed up vulnerable child with no real family or home, the only reason she wanted Ray was because she was emotionally fucked up. How did Starr not figure that out? She should have helped her instead of acting like a jealous, crazy harpy. I really wish Astrid had dobbed Starr in for shooting her, she was unhinged and deserved locking up straight away. Amelia deserved some serious comeuppance as well, she more or less tortured Astrid and the other foster girls, and she got away with it. I guess it was more realistic that way though.

All in all, a great read for anyone who enjoys unlikeable characters.

Ingrid Magnussen was an artist. This was her ultimate rationalization. Everything and everyone was sacrificed on the alter of her egotistical world view. Selfish and mocking to the core, Ingrid is a fascinating but repulsive character. Astrid is left to fend for herself in foster homes. From one broken home to the next, Astrid learns life's lesson and eventually finds the strength to break away from her mother. She will always feel drawn to her mother's siren call, seek the security of her mother's powerful nature. Ingrid's conceit and effrontery were her downfall. She murdered her lover and ended up in jail, but these same flaws, ironically, made her famous and ultimately worked in her favour.
Astrid had a love/hate relationship with her amoral mother. That ending was so poignant. Astrid had no illusions left about her mother's true nature, but her yearning for the diabolical Ingrid is still so strong. I need a light comedy after this one! I picked this up after watching the very decent movie adaptation with Michelle Pfeiffer and Alison Lohman. I have to say, I prefer the movie version. Give me positive over negative every time. Hope springs eternal (but not in White Oleander!)

A story with rare language balancing between beauty and pain. So many themes explored and layers examined. The mother/daughter conflict of adoration and suffocation. The trauma and discovery of growing up and becoming oneself... This one will be sticking with me a while, and makes me wonder what other books like this I've missed.

A heartbreaking read of a mother-daughter relationship and how it all went wrong.