Review: "White Oleander" by Janet Fitch

[LunaRowan]

Book Details:

Title- White Oleander
Author- Janet Fitch
Publisher- 1999: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN- 0-316-56932-1
Genre- Drama
Pages- 390 pages
Rating- 4 of 5


My Review:
When her mother is imprisoned for murdering her boyfriend, 12-year old Astrid Magnussen becomes a ward of the state- a Los Angeles foster child. Coming from a dreamlike, care-free life of traveling and living in the most beautiful, exotic places around the world, and admiring her beautiful, secretive, and hard poet mother's exotic lovers. Ingrid Magnussen raised her daughter to be ruthless, tough, unattached from anyone else, and to certainly never weaken one's resolve. Thrown suddenly into the real world and bounced around from foster family to foster family, craving only the accepting, loving, family, complete with a father, that she has never had. Instead, she must learn to survive as everyone she grows to love along the way is eventually torn away from her.

Her time spent as a ward of the state create some extreme changes in Astrid, as she tries fitting in to each new environment she is forced into, while trying to figure out what she wants for her own life and the kind of person she wants to be herself. She unfortunately decides after these six years that completely walling off her heart to any other being is the only way to avoid the devastation she feels when they all eventually leave her. A personal re-read, White Oleander is a tragic, sometimes overly dramatic, yet real-to-life coming-of-age story that wrings every bit of sympathy out of the reader's heart.

[bluegreenmarina]

Just started reading this, excited to see how it unfolds. Thanks for the review!