Product Description

White Oleander is a painfully beautiful first novel about a young girl growing up the hard way. It is a powerful story of mothers and daughters, their ambiguous alliances, their selfish love and cruel behaviour, and the search for love and identity.Astrid has been raised by her mother, a beautiful, headstrong poet. Astrid forgives her everything as her world revolves around this beautiful creature until Ingrid murders a former lover and is imprisoned for life. Astrid's fierce determination to survive and be loved makes her an unforgettable figure. 'LIQUID POETRY' - Oprah Winfrey 'Tangled, Complex and extraordinarily moving' - Observer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1118562 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-30
• Format: Large Print
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback

Amazon.co.uk Review
Astrid Magnussen, the teenage narrator of Janet Fitch's engrossing first novel, White Oleander, has a mother who is as sharp as a new knife. An uncompromising poet, Ingrid despises weakness and self- pity, telling her daughter that they are descendants of Vikings, savages who fought fiercely to survive. And when one of Ingrid's boyfriends abandons her, she illustrates her point, killing the man with the poison of oleander flowers. This leads to a life-sentence in prison, leaving Astrid to teach herself the art of survival in a string of Los Angeles foster homes.

As Astrid bumps from trailer park to tract house to Hollywood bungalow, White Oleander uncoils her existential anxieties. "Who was I, really?" she asks. "I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces." Fitch adroitly leads Astrid down a path of sorting out her past and identity. In the process, this girl develops a wire-tight inner strength, gains her mother's white-blonde beauty, and achieves some measure of control over their relationship. Even from prison, Ingrid tries to mould her daughter. Foiling her, Astrid learns about tenderness from one foster mother and how to stand up for herself from another. Like the weather in Los Angeles--the winds of the Santa Anas, the scorching heat--Astrid's teenage life is intense. Fitch's novel deftly displays that, and also makes Astrid's life meaningful. --Katherine Anderson

Review
'Hard-hitting, compelling and brilliantly written' COSMOPOLITAN 'Graceful' THE TIMES 'Poignant, virtuosic and utterly captivating' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 'Extraordinary ... Her prose is full of startling images, snippets of poetry and one magnificent, blisteringly angry "found" poem. This highly impressive debut takes on all the big themes' OBSERVER 'Tangled, complex and extraordinarily written' OBSERVER

THE TIMES
'Graceful'

Customer Reviews

Written with perseptive beauty.
White Oleander is a passionate, hypnotic and dangerous novel, exploring un-spoken themes of today's tangled world.
Janet Fitch tells the moving and complicated story of Astrid, a child raised in a potent world of beauty and destruction. Her mother, a twisted and un-earthly artist raises her daughter into this potent world, before emotionally torturing and murdering her former lover, thus leaving Astrid alone and vulnerable. “White Oleander” explores Astrid’s emotional journey through countless foster homes, where she faces incest, murder and, above all, her own powerful mind.
But is not just the twisted, shocking plot which makes this novel un-missable. Fitch writes with tragic passion and charisma, making the characters and their broken worlds dance with life and colour. Each different part of Astrid’s slow clamber to adulthood evokes such empathy and impact, it is virtually impossible not to become addicted.
Although the plot at times becomes very complicated, this book explores love, loss, lust and life, looking at how we can as humans adapt and change over time.
However unbelievable it may seem, this story somehow really made an impact to me personally, making me look at the situations around me in a different way. Fitch makes the book especially enjoyable, by combining a high lexis and sentence structure with beautifully descriptive use of language. Her style makes the whole novel exceptionally pleasurable to read, as her selective use of verbs and adjectives helps us as readers to build up a vivid picture of the unfolding and intriguing life of a strong young ‘lady’. The book rapidly changes from an everyday story into a colourful bible for the aspiring artist in all of us.
In short, I think “White Oleander” is an original and wonderful piece of modern literature. It combines everything I enjoy in a book: wonderfully likable characters, a compelling plot and bags of stylish language technique. Throughout the book, I didn’t want the novel to end. I strongly recommend this compelling book to all e readers, as I think everybody should experience Janet Fitch’s captivating account of life and how truly lucky we are.
Review by Heidi-Victoria Ireland,

The best book I have read in 2000!
I cannot recommend this novel highly enough, and would encourage anyone who can appreciate a well written novel to buy this book. Considering this is Janet Fitch's first novel, it is an amazing piece of literature which keeps you spellbound from beginning to end.

The narrator, Astrid, tells her story of being brought up by a hippie artistic and headstrong mother who kills her boyfriend out of revenge. When Ingrid is imprisoned, the story moves on to Astrid's experiences in foster care. The neglect and abuse Astrid receives are described without being oversentimental and therefore, the reader is engrossed and completely torn by these scenes.

the fact that Astrid survives the experiences shows her strength of character which is an excellent reason to read the book. However, I was also facinated by the descriptions of the American care system as well.

If you only read one book next year, read White Oleander.

Stunning
Put simply, White Oleander is an amazing book. I read it because after reading some of the 'lists' on Amazon, I realised that many people who had appreciated similar books to me had enjoyed it. I was not prepared however for the intensity and wonder of this novel, and am thoroughly surprised that Janet Fitch has not written more novels. For its 500 or so pages, White Oleander is firstly a tiny looking book, and more to the point, one that can be read in a fairly short amount of time, mainly due to the fact that the reader is unable to put it down.

Firstly, the language is amazing, thoughtful and thought provoking. Astrid, the main character, has a deep relationship based on the admiration and dependence of her mother, a poet. She grows up, fatherless, with her mother the poet as her only guardian and, being intelligent, and eager to learn herself, she naturally inherits and develops her mother's talent for use of words and perceptive outlook of the world. All is going swimmingly until her mother is incarcerated for life, and Astrid's safe and almost predictable world is taken away and she is forced to face up to the reality of life by passing from foster home to foster home, where in each case she gains an insight into the everyday life of a huge variety of families and institutions.

The way Fitch enables the reader to thoroughly know and understand Astrid is impeccable, and unlike many novels where several characters means the reader is confused, in White Oleander, the characters and families are so well defined that the reader understands exactly how each has played a part in the life education of Astrid. Each of the many characters is totally distinguished and essential to the story. Another huge merit of Fitch's work is the way Astrid grows from child to adult through the book, with no part of life missed, yet the story flows so naturally that the reader hardly notices this is happening. The reader is, in this way, able to thoroughly relate to Astrid and her experiences.

I would recommend this book to absolutely anyone who appreciates beautiful and insightful language and a deeper insight into life experience.

Altogether, a thoroughly satisfying reading experience.