White Oleander

Synopsis
Astrid's psychopathic poet mother murders her ex-lover, throwing Astrid into the worst of the foster care system.

My thoughts
I liked this book in spite of itself. It's one of those insufferable poetry-written-as-prose novels where you get dense paragraphs of dreamy, elaborate thoughts and descriptions and six pages later you're still waiting for the point of it all.

But Astrid is such a remarkable character that I had to admire her. She's delicate yet resilient in the way only teenagers can be. She worships her selfish, manipulative mother but has to grow up on her own when she's put into foster care after her mother is sent to prison for murdering her ex-boyfriend. Astrid is placed in one foster home after another, each with its own unique set of horrors, and she grows tougher as she navigates each one. There's the ultra-religious woman with the boyfriend Astrid seduces (or the boyfriend who seduces Astrid - it's hard to tell). There's the racist woman who uses Astrid as a free babysitter. There's the woman who seems nice but who starves her foster children. But the most heartbreaking is Claire. She seems like the ideal mother; she takes a genuine interest in Astrid and encourages her to dream big. But it slowly becomes obvious that Claire is dealing with deep psychological issues of her own. So just when Astrid has found someone who cares for her and a place where she feels comfortable, it's all cruelly snatched away from her.

White Oleander is a sobering look at the U.S. foster care system, but it needs to be taken with a boulder of salt. Astrid's experiences with the foster care system seem cobbled together from a collection of news articles about the most abusive foster parents and then stretched and exaggerated for dramatic effect. The majority of foster parents are genuinely good people who perform a service I'm not a strong enough person to take on myself.

It's such a depressing story - and it takes nearly 500 pages to tell - that it's tough to stick with it. But it's also strangely uplifting. Astrid just doesn't give up and she grows in amazing ways throughout her harrowing journey. I will say that Janet Fitch is a master storyteller. She has a gift for inserting monster plot twists that are plausible and exciting. The story never went the way I thought it would, and I never felt like Fitch took the easy way out of untangling any of Astrid's myriad problems.

Bottom line
A good story bogged down by fussy, flowery storytelling.

Fine print
White Oleander, by Janet Fitch
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.