White Oleander

Janet Fitch achieved a miracle with this novel about a girl rambling through a flawed foster care system after her mother is convicted of a heinous crime.

In a predictable set-up, the mother would be supportive despite her incarceration. She would be a wise person offering the girl advice. But the author had the confidence and skill to make the mother a beautiful monster, a brilliant, malignant poet whose attempts at controlling the girl are frustrated by the physical distance between them.

The girl’s growing awareness of her mother’s destructive potential is set against a series of foster families. I… show more.

This lush book, written in 1994, is now something of a classic.

Ingrid is scorned by a man that she sees as being beneath her so she poisons him, and is sent to prison, leaving her daughter Astrid to navigate a series of foster care and adolescence all on her own.

The sweep of descriptive language is lush and languid as the California it depicts. I read this book repeatedly when it first came out, I felt Astrid’s pain as my own. 

White Oleander tells a story about a young girl growing up the hard way after her mother murders her partner and gets sent to jail. Astrid lives her life in social care going from foster care to foster care facing so many difficult scenarios each time it’s unbelievable. A story of pure love and hate between mother and daughter and the challenges that arise in this abusive relationship. This book is so beautifully written it’s like poetry, I had to read it twice and was not surprised when it was made into a movie. 

It’s been many years since I first read this book, and I am still haunted by the voice of its protagonist. Unlike the other mother-daughter books on this list, White Oleander is fiction, although readers who have clung to toxic mothers or endured hardship, abuse, loneliness, and abandonment, will see the truth on every page. The story and its characters are unforgettable.

The dark and complex relationship between a daughter (Astrid) and her poet mother (Ingrid) is the thrust of this engaging work. The story is seen through the eyes of Astrid as she struggles to find a sense of herself as she moves through an array of foster homes, while the aura of her mother and the crime that has led to her incarceration looms over Astrid’s life.

My copy of White Oleander is tattered, with lime-green post-it notes sticking out from the pages, and sentences, often paragraphs, highlighted throughout the novel. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read this haunting, coming-of-age story. I come back to it for two reasons, the clever prose and the relationship between Astrid, the teen narrator, and her mother, in prison for murder. This is how, for instance, Astrid sees herself and her mother: “She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was… show more.

White Oleander tells the story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, who is left to fend for herself in a series of foster homes. The turbulent, difficult mother-daughter relationship in this novel is forever seared into my mind. At its core, this is a novel about finding one's way, no matter what.

Fitch’s characters are powerful, multi-faceted, and written without disclosure. Furthermore, White Oleander is a survival story, which I love. 

When I first read this book, I had just had my second child, and I was in the midst of an abusive marriage. I didn’t necessarily find a sisterhood with Fitch’s characters, which could’ve been true enough, as much as I found an example to follow in genre study. Much of what I endured during those tumultuous years I tunneled into writing, and for that reason, in many ways, White Oleander is a precursor to my writing career, and Trespassing is… show more.