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 mold 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

By: classicshunter
This book is lyrical and painfully beatiful. Living in the mind of a child growing into a woman, her life anything but ordinary, you get swept away. I never wanted it to end.

White Orleander is about Mothers and daughters and the complex relationships we sometimes have with those we love but don't always like.

It's a book about life, death, survival and the redemption of the soul.

Astrid is the teenage daughter of Ingrid now in prison after murdering an ex-lover and Astrid finds herself at the Mercy of the Los Angeles foster care system that is both brutal and tender.

From her first teenage love affair with one of her foster mother's boyfriend's to her life in Berlin as a cynical but gifted young Artist we have driven through a life filled with tears, laughter, and the uncompromising brutality of the human experience.

Astrid is above all a survivor and she takes from her foster life experience a new way of thinking, of understanding those around her, the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

For me the best part of the book was Astrid's artistry of life, along with her acute understanding of mother's selfish whims and desire to be "beautiful and wanted" by the world for her talents as a poet, even though she is languishing in jail.

But Astrid is everything her mother is not, and her ability to carry her life with her in "museums," customised suitcases representing all those people that have influenced her life is wonderful, and you can feel the presence of Star, the God loving, drug taking foster mother, who shoots Astrid for seducing her man, the cowardly and weak Ray and other characters such as the racist Marvel and Olivia a woman for who men are no mystery, the suicidal Claire most beloved to Astrid, the greedy voracious Amelia Ramos, Yvonne a teenage mother with more dreams than sense, the streetwise Rena and Paul, Astrid's young lover in Berlin, like her a former foster child and writer.

And threading its way through the novel always is the power of Ingrid, struggling to keep control of her daughter who is surviving the world without her.

This is not an easy book to read, there is brutality, tenderness, betrayal, and deception in every page but you are compelled to read on and though the ending is far from satisfying it is what you expect.

Read White Orleander, and pray that no one ever makes a suitcase for you that represents your life because if they do you might not like what you see...

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