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Summary: Chilling Story
Review: I think that I am a very naive person and this book opened up my eyes to a lot that goes on in the world. White Oleander was a heartbreaking story of a girl trying to survive in a world that doesn't give a damn about her. The people that do seem to care take advantage of her and turn her into the hard, seemingly uncaring person she is in the end. I kept looking for a sliver of hope for this girl. She was a very strong personality and did what she wanted...whether it was right or wrong. Her relationships were dysfunctional and she was just trying to find the love and acceptance she didn't receive from her parents. In the end she is still fighting demons, but chooses to stand strong and do what is right for her.
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Summary: Striking and rich
Review: I simply could not put White Oleander down. This novel is one that is poignant and tender-hearted; beautiful yet troubling. Characters that come to life (specifically the narrator, Astrid), an engaging plot, and Finch's writing all make reading White Oleander worthwhile.
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Summary: my fave book
Review: i have to disagree with 'a reader from new york city' having a best friend in that situation for many years i know very well that this book can reflect off a foster kid. i believe alot of foster children, try to be better people. alot of foster kids are abused, and i know about that. this book is very well done, i haven't read a book in awhile that makes me wanna stay up all night just to get lost in the pages. it took me less than 2 weeks to read this book b/c i'd stay up all night b/c i didn't want to stop reading it. i took it eveywhere and this book was so in detail. i was so surprised she could write so well about a subject, that she just gathered from other people. it was an amazing book. and i suggest that everyone should read it.
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Summary: Learn to Look at the World Through Different Eyes
Review: White oleander is a flower known for it's beauty AND it's deadly poison. The nature of this flower is a perfect symbol in explaining this book. Upon beginning this book, you feel as if you are being washed in a pale purple lyrical dream full of everything beautiful. The author awakens your senses to the beauty of her characters' world. This beauty is shattered when Astrid's mother, a poet, is put into prison for a crime of passion. Astrid spends several years of her life moving from foster home to foster home. She yearns for the beauty she knew with her mother. Astrid takes a little from every person she meets along the way: good, bad, beauty, and everything else. As an artist, rather than writing a diary, she draws pictures of the world she encounters. White Oleander is a book that draws you inside it. You will long for the book to continue and want to read it slowly so that it will not end too soon. The characters will become as real as your own friends. And, it's a book with a happy ending despite it's often dark and rocky places. It has quickly become one of my top 3 favorite books.
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Summary: Beyond Expectation
Review: After rummaging through a used bookstore for over an hour and still being undecided, I grabbed White Oleander on my way to the register. How fortunate for me, for this novel is simply marvelous. Perhaps at times the author strives too hard to realize the pain of the characters, but over all, this book was nourishment to a hungry reader's soul. In a world dominated by cookie cutter, formulaic writing, this novel is a blessing. It's definately on my top 10 list... I'm missing the copy I lent my sister....
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Summary: Exhausting Read
Review: White Oleander was at the top of my "must read" list, but by the time I finished reading this book I was mentally exhausted. The constant use of foreign languages and metaphors were a bit extreme. Toward the end (last 3 or 4 chapters), I wanted the story to hurry up and end. Nevertheless, the story of a manipulative, selfish mother and the daughter that just wanted to be accepted by her should be told. The story also lets readers peek into the horrific situations that children sometime encounter in foster care systems.
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Summary: This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly ...
Review: ... it is to be thrown across the room with great force. (Dorothy Parker) This book was a huge disappointment from beginning to end. To begin with, I felt that many of the characters were forced stereotypes. It didn't work. I thought the writing and dialogue were below average. No girl could possibly go through all the trauma that this girl does in the book and come out okay. She seems remarkably well adjusted for a young girl who endures a shooting, statutory rape (and that's only the first foster home) among other tragedies. That's because I don't know that many girls would be forced to undergo so much without a social worker finally asking, "What the heck is with these foster families?" While this book is purportedly her coming of age, it reads like a treatise against the entire foster care industry. I read this book because I was alone in a house and there was nothing to read but this. The most false note in this book is the character of the mother. She is so unlikable, and so unrealistic. I kept wishing that the daughter would just tell her mother to shut up. With such a character, I had no sympathy for what happened to her. I think that this book is a poorly written, poorly planned out novel, and it's one that I will never recommend to anybody, except to pan it.
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Summary: A Very TOUCHING Novel-Realistic!
Review: This story would make someone cry when they read it. It is about a young girl whose mother is a poet, and yet dysfunctional in a lot of ways. When Ingrid, the mother loses control over a lover, killing him, she is sent to prison, and Astrid is sent from foster home to foster home.Some of these homes are terrible, and she experiences a lot of trouble with every one of them until she gets Claire as her third foster mother. This is a story in and of itself. She's in this home for awhile until something shattering happens to Claire who loves Astrid like her own. Astrid moves on to yet another home and this one is poverty-stricken. She is angry at her mother throughout the whole book for what her mother has put her through. And though she wants her mother's love deep down, she feels she can never have it. You must read further to see how the story turns out in the end, for I won't tell that part here. It is a very hard book to put down.
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Summary: absolute best book I've ever read
Review: I read this book for the first time about a year ago, and since then, I've thought about it every day. Fitch is an astounding author. She does the best job of any author I've ever read at developing a plot and breathing life into her characters. Astrid and Ingrid are so tangible that I almost feel as if they are real people trapped in a novel. Perhaps I'm just a little too neurotic, but the compulsion to free them is, at times, hard to quell. There is not a soul in the world who shouldn't read this astounding novel.
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Summary: Janet Fitch "Make(s) Magic"
Review: This is not an uplifting novel, but it is a beautiful one; America's first compelling tragedy of the Digital Age, it is the antithesis of L.M. Montgomery. Astrid Magnussen is the most convincing anti-hero of literature since Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, and Fitch's critical stance toward contemporary American life is as timely and valid. "White Oleander" is American myth, flipped; justice, beauty, perserverance, success, triumph, even survival are shown to be dreams of the entitled classes. As poetic and murderous as the ancient Norse Valkyries. Don't pass this up.
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