Astrid and Ingrid are two of the most interesting characters I have encountered. Fitch writes beautifully and the book is littered with rich thoughts and language.

I feel like at this moment I can't rate it because I need to collect some feelings. But more to come

Surovo, bolno, depresivno i skroz iskreno i stvarno. Za mene je ovo bilo katarzično iskustvo koje ću pamtiti jako dugo.

Ono kad knjiga prevazidje sva vasa ocekivanja!

Protagonist Astrid is twelve years old when her single mother, Ingrid, is jilted by a boyfriend and obtains revenge by poisoning him. Ingrid is convicted of murder and sent to prison. Astrid then enters the California foster care system, where she experiences a series of bad placements with dysfunctional families. Her mother still tries to control her from prison by writing manipulative letters. We follow Astrid over six years, as she longs for a mother’s love and escapes into art.

I liked the beginning and ending, but the parts in the middle depict relentless misery. The character of the narcissistic mother is well-developed, as is one of the foster mothers, but others seem more like stereotypes of foster care nightmares. Astrid’s character did not ring true to her age. The amount of mistreatment Astrid suffers would certainly have resulted in psychological trauma, but this topic is never explored. This book is definitely not for everyone due to the amount of disturbing content involving a child (e.g., drug and alcohol consumption, graphic sex, physical abuse, and emotional abuse). I found it uneven, but worth the time invested.

n  A coming-of-age story about a girl forced to confront her feelings towards her mother.n

Loving a mom is a hard thing to do even when you have a good one. I say this because it is not just a love, it is THE love that sets the stage for so many other loves. It teaches you that you can love and not always like and that all other emotions seem to be firmly rooted in that love. It is complicated and it is messy and it is what drives so many decisions in our lives.

My earliest memories include my mother, her holding my hand from the front seat, gently caressing my fingers so I would fall asleep. Entwined in that memory is one of her scolding me and making me pick up bits of hard-boiled egg I had defiantly thrown all over the floor.

I loved her then and she knew it.

She is also featured prominently throughout the memories from my teenage years when I thought every look, every word out of her mouth was the stupidest and most annoying thing ever. Her face pissed me off and what poured out of it only ignited the flame.

I loved her even though I didn’t show it.

Memories of her worried face after each one of my children were born, it said, “Yes, they look perfect but are you okay?” Or her momma bear face as she walked into my hospital room when I thought I could recover from a surgery all alone and then looking over in the middle of the night to see that same face as she slept uncomfortably in the chair by my side.

I loved her and told her all about it.

Reading this book reminded me of all of these moments and it also reminded me that not all people have them. A great mom isn’t guaranteed and some of us have to travel down different roads to search for pieces of THE love that others might take for granted.

A work of art of a novel with complex characters. Slow paced at times but I was never bored. I love how the author wasn't afraid to show Ingrid's dark side and not shy away from it... or to show Astrid in different lights.

Not a novel for everyone (I didn't expect to love it) but I highly recommend trying it.

White Oleander. Oleander is a beautiful flower. It's whiteness suggests a pure, innocent quality, but it is anything but innocent. Oleander is an extremely poisonous plant, and it works as a good symbol of Astrid's mother Ingrid. Ingrid is extremely beautiful, blonde, pale, tall, graceful. She makes men's heads turn. But she is also wrathful, manipulative, and a murderer. It's hard to see the good in Ingrid, but this book is so complex that the lines between good and bad blur.

What is known is that this book describes a desire to be loved. It's that clinging sensation humans feel to reach out and be touched and held and loved. Then there is the never-ending pain. Astrid learns that living equals pain, a pain that comes to her no matter where she goes. In some instances she seeks it. In some instances it just happens. But there is this strange relationship between Astrid and Pain. It's like she doesn't want to live in it, but she doesn't know any other way. Because of that, she identifies with her pain, and so, her misery and her self become inseparable.

It's interesting that the book can be so beautiful at times but then describe such gruesome, tragic events. There are some instances of the book that are downright disgusting if one stops to think about them. Yet it's how Astrid narrates her story, which causes the book to not feel as disgusting as one might expect to feel. It's slightly hard to explain. It reminds me of a starving, anorexic girl with pale skin, and bones sticking out of her arms and ribs. It's gruesome. It's tragic. But Astrid sees some deeper truth in that girl. It's like there is beauty and understanding, and tragedy mixed in with hope. Like I said, this book is entirely complex.

It's very intriguing how Astrid views the world. She sees beauty in the weeds, perhaps because she feels like a weed. She feels unwanted, and with reason because she is treated so horribly. Not many good things happen to her. Not many happy moments exist in this book. They do exist, but they're like gems hidden in broken shards of glass and one has to cut oneself a hundred times before one can find them and hold onto them, and only for a moment, where they have to be cast away just because that's the way the world works, and one finds oneself walking through the glass all over again.

So, overall, I really liked the book. The diction is really quite marvelous. Every sentence has a way about it, that lets you feel the emotions that Astrid feels. And the book really encompasses every emotion of the human spectrum. There is pain, and regret, and misery, and hope, and love, and fear, and despair, and paranoia, and disgust, and self-loathing, and confusion, and there is all these things, and in the end there is understanding, or at least a coming to an understanding, which is a nice change to the dark tempo of the novel.

Would I recommend this book? Most definitely. It has a special character to it. In other words, it is a unique book that one can also get lost in. The tragedy is not in your face, it is just like, art that is placed in front of you and is saying, "Here I am. Look at me. Observe. What do you see? What do you feel?" That's what it is. And like how art can be interpreted in so many ways, this book can be too. There are hidden truths in here. This book almost screams TRUTH! It's hard for me not to see it; it's hard for me not to feel it. So, it is 4 stars. I think it could have possibly have been 5 stars if I let myself become completely immersed in the novel. If I felt the pain and was right there with Astrid crying with her, it could have been a 5. I just couldn't let myself lose that much control of my emotions. I've felt my share of pain in my life, and I didn't want to feel that, not like how she feels it. So I looked at her story from a distance. Like I was looking at art on a wall. If one were to step into the painting and live through her life there with her, it would be unbearable almost. It would be too much pain. Yet despite being tragic, it really is a marvelous book.

This is a powerfully written, haunting novel about flawed characters. I listend to audio version which was well executed. The book paints a harrowing picture of foster care in Los Angeles County.

Do not be fooled by the “Oprah’s Book Club” nonsense: this book is both beautiful and brutal. It can feel slow at time, but it is also impossible to forget.

Mother-daughter relationships are probably one of the hardest things to write about. It’s such a complex, nuanced rapport – writing about it means walking such a very fine line and I think that Janet Finch did an incredible job of illustrating a particularly intricate and flawed relationship with “White Oleander”. Of course, no one has the same family baggage, which makes the interpretation of a story like Astrid’s tricky: no one will feel the same about it. In my family, mother-daughter relationships have almost always been strained (and not just for me and my mom: this is a multi-generational problem), so when I first read this book and saw how Astrid went from adoring her mother to wanting to distance herself from her as much as she could, I thought “yep, I get it.”

I loved the prose, the motif of every foster home being its own little universe, its own learning experience for Astrid. No matter where she goes, she is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar world. The view of foster homes is very bleak: they are all deeply dysfunctional in one way or another, and when Astrid begins to actively seek living in a messed-up environment, I wasn’t surprised; after everything that she had been through, this is a rather classic coping mechanism. The foster mothers can feel cliché at times, but I saw them as gates that Astrid had to get through to understand how to survive by herself. Ingrid is a fascinating creation: so complex, showing a cold surface that hides it’s fair share of secret suffering. I loved how Astrid tries to define herself as more than just her mother’s daughter, even when she sees her influence in the way she behaves.

The lack of stability and of reliable emotional support in her life forces Astrid to grow up much too fast, become aware of some things some adults don’t even understand, and it is a heartbreaking journey. I think of this book more as a survival tale than as a coming-of-age story, really. Her strength and endurance are remarkable: she somehow never lets herself be beaten down by all the tragedies she had to face, and even when she is weary and feeling completely at the end of her rope, she soldiers on. I rooted for her the whole way and just wished she would find a place that really felt like home.

I must say that Finch perfectly captures the strange mix of love, anger, yearning, hatred, hope and self-doubt that one experiences when a relationship with a parent becomes toxic. The need to find someone to attach yourself to because you feel abandoned, and the despair of finding yourself having to start from scratch when you end up on your own yet again is also heartbreakingly spot on. Add to that some very evocative prose and clever use of symbolism: even when this book gets depressing and disturbing, it is impossible to put down very long.

Obviously, this book strikes a particularly sensitive nerve for me, and I can see how some people would be horrified by it or simply not understand it. I’d recommend you give it a shot anyway: just as with every character this book contains, there is more to it than meets the eye. The movie is great, but it really doesn't do the book justice because it fails to capture Astrid's inner world. In this case, the book wins hands down.

I would rather be stuck on a desert island with nothing at all to do than be stuck with only this book. No, wait, if I could be stuck with this book, I could at least burn it for warmth.

I'll pass, thanks.


Two things about this book really bothered me.

1. Sex between a 14 year old and a 50-something. Abuse is terrible, and some of the most important books out there tell heartbreaking, awful stories. Thankfully, I can't begin to understand 14 year old Astrid's situation, but Fitch's presentation of the situation as "consensual" is incomprehensible to me. Astrid's 14--she's a child and cannot consent.

2. Overwriting. There's a line between beautiful and overwritten prose...and in my opinion, this writing crosses that line by far.


I trudged through the whole thing because I wanted to try to understand why people have such strong reactions to it. I did appreciate that Astrid's character develops over time. Overall, this one just wasn't for me (two stars).