Seriously overwrought:
"Yes, I was tattooed, just as she'd said. Every inch of my skin was penetrated and stained. I was the original painted lady, a Japanese gangster, a walking art gallery. Hold me up the light, read my bright wounds. If I had warned Barry I might have stopped her. But she had already claimed me. I wiped my tears, dried my hands on the white cat, and reached for another handful of glass to rub on my skin. "

Weird hybrid of highfalutin prose with an ultra-soapy plot. Self-indulgently, I stayed for the latter. Which unfortunately lost its steam in the last hundred pages. Was not "tangled. complex and extraordinarily moving" as the cover suggests. It was okay but I wish I'd read something else.

Astrid's life is a shitshow. Sometimes it's her fault, but mostly it's her mother's, and the foster care system's fault.

The prose of this one is beautiful, and the story is tragic.

Astrid survives the best way she can without total darkness, but man is there a lot of sorrow in her life.

This is one, that you just need to read.

4.75 stars rounded up to 5.

A poignant, harsh look at surviving, discovering, and overcoming painful truths about the person who should love you the most. Beautifully and descriptively written, this definitely shows the complexities of relationships, especially that of between a mother and her daughter.

This book was an escape from my usual paranormal smut and urban fantasy adventures, and it is so worth the change in scenery. I had to read the book for my Vulnerable Children class, where I am learning about the child welfare system. It was a poignant tale of one girl’s tumultuous journey through the foster care system and will no doubt leave your jaw hanging on many occasion. As a human being, you will be horrified at the life that Astrid must endure after her mother is sent to prison for murder. And Astrid’s mother, Ingrid, is one of the most complex characters I’ve ever read. You will want to reach through the pages to ring her neck all the while experiencing sadness over her situation.

I was sickened by how Astrid was treated by these foster parents. They destroyed her innocence. Astrid reached out for love and was constantly slapped in the face, except for a few encounters that introduced this young lady to love and evil, themes that are very interconnected in this story. I was also sickened at the role of the social workers in this book! They treated Astrid like shit and I am horrified at the thought of a real social worker acting this way.

Janet Fitch’s writing is downright magical, poetic and intoxicating. I felt every hunger pang, every yearning for some semblance of normalcy, every embarrassing, depressing and desperate moment, every let down, every heart break, every smile, every relationship that was real and the many that were not. The book is raw and leaves your breathless.

Most of you have probably heard of this movie, which I watched recently, and thoroughly enjoyed. However, with any book, your imagination is always better, and in the case of this book, your heart breaks even more intensely. The ultimate reality of this book is that Astrid’s myriad of foster home experiences is an unfortunate common theme amongst foster children. This book is one story out of thousands that we have not heard. However, If you are up for a change of scenery, and a story that will steadily tug at your heartstrings, all the while filling you with hope that resiliency is real and can save someone, then take a dive into this book, head first.


Notable Quotes

"I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim."


"And I tried not to make it worse by asking for things, pulling her down with my thoughts. I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn’t they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?"


"I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to."


"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."


"And I realized 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."


"I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze."

Que livro!

História crua, dura, que demonstra o quão tortuosas, doentias e sufocantes podem ser as relações entre mães e filhas...

Desenvolverei em breve, mas fica já a recomendação vivíssima!

NOTA - 9/10 (o livro poderia ser um nadinha mais curto, só lhe aponto isso como menos positivo)

Thanks, dear Paulinha!

***NO SPOILERS***

White Oleander is a pretty flower--and it's poisonous. Fitch's title for her gorgeously written, gripping literary fiction novel will become clearer and clearer the deeper one gets into the story. Suffice it to say a pretty, poisonous flower is the perfect metaphor for this coming-of-age, against-all-odds tale.

Fitch is an author to admire not just because of the story she crafted but because of exactly how she told it. There's so much artistry in her words. (As evidence one needs only to read a few quotations from this book.) She's really a poet, having written collections of poetry prior to this; White Oleander is her first novel. There's great sadness in these pages, and main character Astrid's hopelessness and desperation, her longing for and anger toward her mother, is palpable throughout--but there's also hope and redemption. This is ultimately a survival story. Anyone who loves introspective stories that are unafraid to face ugly truths will find White Oleander deeply meaningful.

Final verdict: Fitch's story very likely will appeal to fans of The Goldfinch and The Glass Castle and to those who enjoy stories about troubled family relationships. Easily five stars.

Beautiful and memorable.

3.5 stars

Loved the beginning but had mixed feelings about the middle and the ending.

Really a 1.5 star book for me -- barely rounding up rather than down.

Truth be told: the whole thing started off well enough. I believed the first person voice; I was intrigued by this brittle, chilly, contemptuous matriarch; I got a kick out of the underemployed alcoholic neighbor who was always reading Variety and recording audiobooks; I felt a connection with the pop cultural and literary references that were squarely in my wheelhouse (e.g. I used to own a cassette of Anne Sexton reading her poems); even some of the specific experiences spoke to me (I've been to a gamelan concert, and it was extraordinary). For me, the problems started with Ingrid getting the romance cooking with Barry to begin with -- I bought her murder of him (it was less to do with her having been jilted than to do with him having usurped her role as the one doing the jilting, should she have so chosen -- her resentment at that could totally have manifest itself in murder), but I didn't buy his wearing down her defenses. Here is a woman character who is shockingly assertive, coiled with rage, alive with loathing for -- and disappointment in -- others, the exact and sharp opposite of a misogynist, who is persistently spurning the creepy advances of a man making no secret of his stalking of her, a man whose physical presence and attitude toward art (I'm thinking here of his "Well, that gamelan concert sure made me HUNGRY!" response to the art that had possessed her) not only sickens her, but is antithetical to everything about her. And she falls for him? Sorry. Not even in some parallel fictional universe. But the book had to have her fall for him -- the plot depended on it. So this was Janet Fitch forcing her narrative along a trajectory, rather than allowing it to surprise even her. And so the novel came totally off the rails for me there...

And with the succession of foster homes, she gives us instance after instance of predictable soap opera, of a novel as a machine making its tired way through proscribed exercises, through stereotype after stereotype. I have no doubt that there are foster parents out there like these monsters, but however believable any of them might have been is erased because of Fitch's need to give us the whole damn gamut of monstrous foster parents: Starr is a hypocritical and oversexed religious tramp; Ray is the stud conundrum that is swarthy and romantic handyman-cum-child molester (pun intended); Marvel is a fiercely bigoted and aesthetically tacky ignoramus; Amelia is a slave-driving Disney stepmother; even Claire (who often feels like a refreshingly complex character) is reduced to TV-movie-of-the-week caricature in the scene where -- in one fell swoop! -- she plants a non-Platonic smooch on her foster daughter's lips AND reveals that she is suicidal AND confesses to wishy-washy bulimia! And so I felt like I was just plodding along through a series of predictable Jerry Springer cartoons. Not even the violence that befalls Astrid (the statutory rape, the gunshot to the hip, the dog attack, the starvation and humiliation of eating from the trash) moved me, because I felt like it was all manufactured to move me, to force me to feel pity. It was just too much.

And speaking of forcing chess pieces into the narrative (a la Ingrid falling for Barry): Marvel and her doltish hardware-store-managing husband and their brood of kids would never have been rubbing suburban elbows with a high-end prostitute accustomed to living so swanky and posh a life that she pays cash for sweaters and lunches that cost many hundreds of dollars and dresses like Grace Kelly when she goes out (and, more to the point, that posh prostitute would never have been rubbing elbows with them) -- these two characters (Marvel and Olivia) would never, in the real world, inhabit the same zip code, let alone live alongside one another on the same block, BUT because Fitch needed there to be a black prostitute about whom Marvel could make racist, lewd remarks, the believable is cast aside. Fitch creates a suburban community that rings utterly false because she never allows the class prejudice that would've prohibited such proximity to be acknowledged in an effort to create an environment in which racial prejudice can actually be exaggerated. Come on.

And don't get me started on the prose: the descriptions -- and memories -- of sex were out-and-out risible: e.g. "he pulled me on top of him and I rode him like a horse in the surf [...] through a spray of sparks," or Ingrid fantasizing -- in a letter to her daughter -- about Dan the Man giving her the high hard one in the anus on the hood of a '72 Mustang, or Astrid remembering Ray's "column of vein" in her mouth, or her imagining a "white sea of sperm." This is Bad Sex Award writing. And then the metaphors and similes: Fitch just floods the second half of the book with them, and they (unlike in the writing of Tom Robbins, for instance, where the glut of metaphors and similes are a constant raising of the stakes of comedic invention) serve no purpose other than to showcase Fitch's authorial self-consciousness: the writing becomes a giant neon arrow pointing at itself. Sebastian Barry writes prose that reads like poetry without calling attention to itself. So does Peter Carey and Cormac McCarthy. Suffice to say: Janet Fitch's poetic prose feels like the prose of an angsty teenage poet who cut her teeth on Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In fact, the bulk of the 26th chapter felt so much like a prose reimagining of Plath's poem "Daddy" (at least where tone and voice were concerned), forgive me for being wholly unsurprised when Plath's name is dropped in the first two or three pages of the very next chapter for (unless I'm mistaken) the very first time in the book (and don't even get me started on the labored "Lady Lazarus" allusions -- or how her echoing the two Plath poems most commonly read by undergraduates betrays an undergraduate sensibility in White Oleander). Which brings me to another gripe about the novel: there is so much freaking literary and cultural name-dropping and overt allusion that it ceased to imbue the book with meaning. Sexton, Plath, Rilke, Goethe, Schiller, Leonard Cohen, Kandinsky, Georgia O'Keefe, Joseph Brodsky, Antonioni, Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, Brecht, Marcel Carne, Durer, Germaine Greer, Whitman, Greta Garbo, Euripedes, the list goes wearily on (and many of these are artists with whose work I'm deeply familiar) -- all of these references ceased to feel like organic outcroppings on the terrain of the book, and came to feel, instead, like examples of Fitch preening, or trading cheaply on the works of geniuses to embellish the intellectual cachet of her own novel (which, when all is said and done, amounts to little more than a potboiler).

There were bits about the novel I really liked: like I said, Claire was an interesting character a good deal of the time, and I would have been broken up about her death had I not seen it coming a mile away; and Paul Trout was a wonderful invention who Fitch shoos off the page just paragraphs after introducing him, bringing him back just long enough at the end to make us angry that he hadn't been a presence throughout the book; and Ingrid, for all of my disbelief in her, flashes genuine and alarming menace in the novel, and inspires real anxiety in me as a reader. But the noteworthy stuff pales against the painful stuff. Alas.

This book was horrid.

The only thing worse than Fitch's forced dramatic prose was her insistence and apparent passion for sexualizing the main character, Astrid, at every perceived opportunity (a child). Much of the writing is melodramatic, just self indulgent, pompous, excessive use of cliches and vainglorious piddle. Romanticizes the main character's fucked up life by reveling in her mental dysfunction with superfluous, redundant similes until I wanted to rip my hair out.

I felt like aspects of this book had so much potential. I was particularly interested to see how Fitch would describe the relationship between a sociopath/narcissistic parent and her aimless, abused adolescent kid whom she can't control from prison. Alas, Ingrid, the mother character, is a complete cliche as an apparently brilliant but obscure writer. Her "menacing" character falls flat because Fitch insists on using the most absurd, pompous dialogue that anyone would laugh at if spoken in person.

I honestly hated this book but I kept reading because I wanted to find out what happens. Many people recommended it to me, so I was kind of surprised that it sucked so bad.

Reading this book was like being punched in the guts repeatedly and being glad about it

Don't let the 3 star rating turn you off - this was a good book (probably more like a 3.5). I'm tying to rate my books more honestly, and while I really liked this book there was enough that bothered me that I can't give it 4 or 5 stars.

White Oleander is CERTAINLY a story that will stick with me for a long, long time. There were parts of it I found haunting and profound. And I couldn't put it down, despite not much happening most of the time (with brief spurts of action).

But, while I know it's a favorite for so many, it is not going down as a favorite for me. I found the writing to be sometimes lovely and sometimes overwrought. It's very poetic, but the poetry of it didn't always work for me. I literally rolled my eyes at some of the many, many similes and metaphors (ex. when Astrid describes her dad as 'a shape filled with rain'...WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?). I didn't feel emotionally connected to Astrid or her situation despite the fact that every foster care home she was put in seemed to be as dysfunctional (at best) or abusive (at worst) as the last. It was all just so bleak, and yet I didn't really have an emotional reaction to it because Astrid was such a detached character; and yet, I still felt a little emotionally manipulated because nothing good ever happened. Now, having said that, I could totally see how someone who relates to Astrid's situation would be a lot more emotionally invested in her than how she's presented on the page and my experience of her.

Those are my big criticisms. BUT, I will also say that the ending of the book was stunning. It was hopeful without tying everything together in a neat bow. We got a beautiful scene of closure between Astrid and her mother. Her mother, Ingrid, was a TERRIBLE, pretentious, selfish person - to the point that she almost reads like she's a sociopath. But, this conversation Astrid has with her at the end of the book reveals another side (doesn't make her a good person, but at least she shows a little remorse). I loved that. And like I said, I couldn't put the book down. It made me think about so many things, and there were quotes that struck me deeply. Here are some of those...

'I hadn't understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.'

'Wild mustard flowered on the cracked banks, and I picked a bouquet for Yvonne. What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler's coat, something that didn't belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn't it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.'

(reflecting on her HS graduation) 'I was crying. I knew I could have done better, I could have made arrangements, I could have followed up, found someone to help me. At this moment my classmates were going up for their awards, National Merit, Junior State. How did I get so lost? Mother, why did you let my hand slip from yours on the bus, your arms so full of packages? I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.'