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Summary: An Emotional, Unpredictable Journey
Review: White Oleander is the story about a young girl named Astrid who is sent to a foster home after her mother is imprisoned for murder. Completely on her own, Astrid is forced to decide on what type of person she wants to become. Her mother consistently sends letters, trying to mold her, but Astrid refuses to give in to her mother. Instead, she learns different lessons from her many different foster families. Astrid keeps changing throughout the book, and you don't know how she'll turn out to be until the end.
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Summary: White Oleander
Review: White Oleander was an awsome book it keep me into the story the hole time. I never wanted to but this book down. I have also seen the movie. The movie was a little different then the book though. I really recermend this book for anyone to read.
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Summary: Beautiful work of art...
Review: Fitch takes you on an amazing ride through the life of teenager Astrid. Astrid weaves in and out of foster homes after her mother is sentenced for life by killing a man who didn't want to love her anymore. Ingrid (Astrid's mother) writes continuously to Astrid; letters of pain and hope and how Astrid can survive without her mother shrouding her from every kind of raw and bitter truth. Without her mother as a shroud, Astrid soon discovers the lows and highs of the rollercoaster called life. She is shot by one foster mother after having a sexual relationship with her boyfriend and is soon shipped right off to another home, which seems more stable. She becomes enlightened by a black women who appears in the story to be a prostitute. She goes in and out of 3 more foster homes before arriving at her permanent placehold until she departs as a women to be on her own.
Astrid deals with the confusion of her past by her mother repeating in every letter, "Remember who you are." She soon realizes the ignorance and spiteful pity behind her mother's poetic and hateful words. The entire sotry is like a poem, beautifully written, dripping in metaphors of white milk skies and a bleeding world. Highly recommended.
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Summary: Beautiful Tale
Review: This book was one of the better books I have read recently. It was sitting on my shelf for a lot longer than it should have. Something about the cover told me to hold off, but I should have known that looks can be deceiving. Ingrid and Astrid are mother and daughter. But not your typical American mother and daughter team. Ingrid is a poet with a bohemian lifestyle, and her daughter Astrid a very talented artist. The fundamental difference is that Ingrid's and Astrid's longing in life are opposite. Ingrid wants everything outside of the norm, and Astrid just wants a normal home life. Of course, Astrid gets anything but a normal childhood from her mother, or the subsequent foster mothers she encounters after Ingrid is jailed for murder.Narrated by Astrid, this tale is so fluid in description and feeling that you just float through the book. I was disappointed at the end, not only because I didn't want the story to end, but because I wanted to know more. Don't skip out on this great book.
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Summary: White Oleander is a powerful story!!
Review: White oleader is a great story that is written very well. i read this book for my english class after having watched that movie and found the book much better! although i had some trouble with some of the writing about art, i still found the story to be excellent and janet fitch kept me interested all throughout the book! everyone should read this book.
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Summary: Beautiful Story!
Review: White Oleander is a beautiful story. It brought back my love of reading. My boyfriend bought it for me and I can't stop thanking him for it. This story will touch your heart.
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Summary: White Oleander: Rare Beauty
Review: Being of such a young age, I think I am yet to fully understand the depth of Janet Fitch¡¦s White Oleander. But, as a high school student, it is my God-given right to speculate, and that I will. I finished reading White Oleander at eight in the morning, having started reading it from ten o¡¦clock the previous night. It was intended to serve the purpose of light reading before bedtime, but for some unexplainable reason, I just couldn¡¦t put the book down. Well, perhaps I can attempt to explain it. Janet Fitch¡¦s writing is truly remarkable. It is not only filled with rich language and amazing descriptions, but it is so unbelievably real. It¡¦s like ¡§get out of my head!¡¨ scary. She is able to not only completely become Astrid, a depressing but very real girl, but wholly capture the essence of the stupidity Starr suffers, the mediocrity Mabel enjoys, and the vulnerability Claire bears. This novel exposes the dark side (and is there another?) of foster-homes, and shows how Astrid attempts to mold to each of her drastically different environments in order to find an answer, an answer that her mother won¡¦t give her. And why? Because it delights her oh-so-clever ultra-feminist poet self to watch her daughter cope with society as she sits behind bars for murder? I don¡¦t know. What¡¦s more important is to observe the cultivating of one girl¡¦s entire philosophy through her experiences. Astrid goes from being a young trusting 11 year old to an 18 year old tough-as-nails, and the reader is with her all the way. It¡¦s marvelous that Fitch doesn¡¦t merely create new, ¡§older¡¨ lines for Astrid to speak. She creates new thoughts. My only complaint is that at times, one does start to wonder how the reader is expected to believe that this fantastic sum of horrible, horrible things could really happen to one person. And if it could, God, do we live in a world filled with selfish people, twisted people, not-so-great people, and no one (except for maybe Paul) is exempt. If I had to describe this book in one word (which really isn¡¦t possible), I would say: thought provoking. If you can handle it, read it.
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Summary: Brilliance
Review: The words are poetry itself, and they flow from the pages like quicksilver. The prose in this novel is like ambrosia. I breathed every word, bleeding for the next. "White Oleander" is utterly brilliant. There are not enough words to convey how amazing this book is. I adored the story. I loved Astrid to death, but I lived for Ingrid. She fascinated me, with her opinions and actions, her whorled strength, and marked love. The parallels that Janet Fitch drew while writing this were fantastic. I admire her, and respect her talent. However, I would not recommend this book for everyone. Despite adoring it, not everyone will. Only read if know you can handle the pain enfolded within the pages.
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Summary: Stop giving this book good reviews!
Review: The protagonist was uninspiring. The rest of the characters were unredeemable. The narrative was disjointed. This is the worst book I've read in the last 2 years.
This was also one of the most insulting portrayals of women I have ever seen. The main character is a girl who conforms to every environment in which she is placed; at the end we are supposed to believe she has found "herself" but we see so little of that self, it is utterly unconvincing. Among the other women are the selfish, conniving mother; the weak housewife; the hypocritical religious freak; the black high-class call girl; and the cold, unfeeling Russian foster-mother. There was not a single positive portrayal of women in here and I was offended by these caracitures of (mostly)stereotypical "feminine" faults. The only likeable character, in my humble opinion, was Astrid's boyfriend. If only Ms. Fitch could given even one of the female characters his combination of strength and compassion, well, maybe I wouldn't have hated this book so much. I can't believe a woman wrote it.
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Summary: Pure Poetry
Review: The prose in this novel is pure poetry, not since Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita have I had the pleasure of reading prose infused with such intelligence and imagery. The poetic prose that Janet Fitch delivers in this novel is some of the most poignant and beautiful writing I have read, and I have read A LOT. Her command of the English language and of human nature is amazing. White Oleander is the product of an author who has mastered her craft. This is not your classic mother/daughter story, it is the story of a daughters' journey to become a woman, to accept herself and her mother for who and what they were and have become. The mother, Ingrid is an integral character in her daughter, Astrid's life. Ingrid is powerful and uncompromising and these are two of her biggest weaknesses. Fitch has written her wonderfully, you want to hate her at times just a bit and at others a whole lot, but still she has just enough vulnerability to draw you to her. Astrid is wonderful, witty intelligent and lovable even when she is being a brat. You don't pity her when she faces the tortures that life in the foster system throw at her, you admire her strength and her perseverance. Astrid becomes a new girl with each and every home she is placed in, and every woman she has known in these homes or because of these homes has touched her and shaped her. Ingrid is the one constant in Astrid's life, a constant that most times Astrid would prefer not to have at all, and it is Ingrid that looms as the largest and most difficult obstacle Astrid must tackle. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading. You don't have to be an English major to enjoy this book, but it does help.
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