This book is the tale of a girl with a warrior poetess for a mother. When her mother kills a boyfriend and is imprisoned the girl is thrown into California's foster care system. There she experiences ignorance, abuse, and need, and love in equal measure, and tries to grow up, while struggling with her anger with her mother for abandoning her.

Orphans generally make sympathetic protagonists. One can't help but hope things will get better for someone who has lost everything, who is at the bottom of every pecking order. In this book, we care especially for Astrid, the protagonist, because she has to battle the overbearing personality of her mother. Also, it turns out that Oliver Twist may have had it better than the modern day foster kid.

Astrid is old for her age, able to see people's motivatioin. Much of this she learned from her mother. She is also an artist, and the narration reflects this sense for people and eye for detail. The physical impact of characters, their beauty, and their sex and their ugliness and their weakness are all described with detailed realism. Houses and rooms are described in terms of cultural milieu, and their impact on the narrator's mood. The effect is that this is a book that one feels one has lived in, rather than read. The characters are not fictions, but old acquaintances. The characterization also is strikingly good.

So read this book. If you don't like it, you shouldn't read, it's an insult to books for them to have you read them.

I was gripped by the plot and the mother/daughter hook and could not put it down. However, even though I couldn't stop reading, it was often hard to keep reading. There were parts that dragged but overall the novel was interesting. I found the character of the daughter to be beautifully developed and appealing.

A quick plot summary: Astrid is a 12 year old girl when the novel opens living with her mother--an artist and narcissist. Her mother kills her boyfriend, sending Astrid into a series of foster homes. Ultimately, Ingrid (the mother) attempts to get Astrid to lie for her so that she can be released from prison.

The story's main interest for me lay in the relationship between Astrid and her manipulative, self-centered mother. Astrid's attempts to negotiate the foster care system were also interesting.

This is my favorite book of all time.

Compared to this eternal body, the individual was a smoke, a cloud. The body was the only reality. I hurt, therefore I am.

Fitch has written one of the most compelling, saddening, poetic novels. I sit here with my book closed, staring at the cover, wondering 'what now?'. Her words keep turning over in my head. I keep thinking about Astrid Magnussen and Ingrid and Niki and Yvonne and Claire - even Rena. There's so much to grieve, so much to turn over. The book itself is grief - how one is hardened when one isn't allowed to truly process anything. My heart wept for Astrid. I wanted to hug her. Fitch's language is so enticing and melodic - piercing even. The characters are distinct and real. Their voices are clear. This book has truly shifted something within my brain.