Book Reviews
Ms. Fitch is...concerned with the ghostlike role that the ferocious Ingrid plays in her daughter's memory once she has left for prison....What keeps White Oleander from devolving into a television mini-series is Ms. Fitch's aptitude for delineating Astrid's inner life....The...novel is frequently obvious and over the top but at the same time oddly haunting.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
A loosely stitched-together series of these worst nightmares: a mother who starves her young, a high-class prostitute, a suicidal fading actress, a tough-talking Russian flea-market hustler...Fitch's writing has trippy, visceral power, but the reader remains unconvinced that she hasn't just written this as an exercise in high-brow shock lit.
Alexandra Lange - New York Magazine
In Janet Fitch's first novel, White Oleander, Astrid Magnussen, a pliant 11-year-old, loses Ingrid, her mother—an arrogant feminist poet from Los Angeles—when the woman gets thrown in prison for poisoning her ex-boyfriend. By the time Astrid is 18, she is hard from years of San Fernando Valley foster care: from being shot by one "mother" for stealing her seven-fingered boyfriend, from being mauled by dogs on a suburban street, from being dropped by a high-class black hooker who's taught her about the rewards of cashmere and the weaknesses of men, from being forced into servitude by a racist blue-collar hag interested only in the bottled color of her own hair, from losing the one cultured and nurturing female in her teenage life to suicide. Despite her hardness, though, Astrid—who narrates this episodic drama—views her life always with openness and mostly with gratitude: Had her birth mother been the only woman to raise her, she would never have learned about the varieties of women and the myriad ways they suffer.
At the center of White Oleander is Astrid's ever-evolving relationship with Ingrid, pursued, for the most part, through the mail. At first the girl, more visually than verbally articulate, sends her mother drawings of the people looking after her, and Ingrid responds with sound warnings against the drug addicts and drunks she finds on the pages in front of her. After a while, though, as her daughter grows to love these women, the less than maternal inmate, angry and jealous, turns away from her and toward a growing audience of young female readers in love with the figure of the captive poet. And so Astrid suffers a double loss, emotional as well as physical. This is where Fitch does her best work: She shows that children can survive gunshot wounds, dog attacks, poverty, fatherlessness and even neglect, but that losing the love of a mother threatens them with losing themselves. It's hard to know whether the author means for her narrator to be unreliable or not. What are we supposed to think about a young woman who continues to look back with fondness on the many horrors of her childhood? Are we supposed to feel uplifted because, in spite of all the scars, she still has a heart? White Oleander has the feel of a book written over years in a workshop setting: Though the story doesn't quite add up—though it remains linear and rather simple-minded—you can appreciate the author's hard work and determination and the love of the community of women she weaves through the sentences. On occasion the book is a page-turner (it's amazing how compelling a child's misery can be), and always the characters are as real as the person who sleeps beside you. In the case of White Oleander, though, they always leave.
Trish Deitch Roher - Salon
Thirteen-year-old Astrid Magnussen, the sensitive and heart-wrenching narrator of this impressive debut, is burdened with an impossible mother in Ingrid, a beautiful, gifted poet whose scattered life is governed by an enormous ego. When Ingrid goes to prison for murdering her ex-lover, Astrid enters the Los Angeles foster care program and is placed with a series of brilliantly characterized families. Astrid's first home is with Starr, a born-again former druggie, whose boyfriend, middle-aged Ray, encourages Astrid to paint (Astrid's absent father is an artist) and soon becomes her first lover, but who disappears when Starr's jealousy becomes violent. Astrid finds herself next at the mercy of a new, tyrannical foster mom, Marvel Turlock, who grows wrathful at the girl's envy of a sympathetic next-door prostitute's luxurious life. "Never hope to find people who will understand you," Ingrid archly advises as her daughter's Dickensian descent continues in the household of sadistic Amelia Ramos, where Astrid is reduced to pilfering food from garbage cans. Then she's off to the dream home of childless yuppies Claire and Ron Richards, who shower her with gifts, art lessons and the warmth she's been craving. But this new development piques Ingrid's jealousy, and Astrid, now 17 and a high school senior, falls into the clutches of the entrepreneurial Rena Grushenka. Amid Rena's flea-market wares, Astrid learns to fabricate junk art and blossoms as a sculptor. Meanwhile, Ingrid, poet-in-prison, becomes a feminist icon who now has a chance at freedom—if Astrid will agree to testify untruthfully at the trial. Astrid's difficult choice yields unexpected truths about her hidden past, and propels her already epic story forward, with genuinely surprising and wrenching twists. Fitch is a splendid stylist; her prose is graceful and witty; the dialogue, especially Astrid's distinctive utterances and loopy adages, has a seductive pull. This sensitive exploration of the mother-daughter terrain (sure to be compared to Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here) offers a convincing look at what Adrienne Rich has called "this womanly splitting of self," in a poignant, virtuosic, utterly captivating narrative.
Publishers Weekly
Fitch's startling debut novel is a raw and sorrow-filled exploration of the adolescence of the only child of a brilliant, selfish, and totally egocentric poet who was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing her lover. Etched with great suffering and amazing survival, White Oleander follows Astrid's torturous path from foster home to foster home, haunted by her mother's letters from jail and reflected in her own artistic vision. Alyssa Bresnahan fully inhabits the challenging and lyrical narrative through the voices of both daughter and mother, capturing the listener's full attention and heart as it becomes difficult to put aside and even harder to forget. An Oprah Book Club selection, the novel has a guaranteed popularity it richly deserves, and this audio version will win additional readers because of the perfect combination of this powerful story and characters with the skillful reading. Highly recommended. —Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY
Library Journal