![]() ![]() ![]() Fitch spares no painful detail as she moves through each home and Astrid’s increasingly toughened reactions, but the language is anything but rough. ![]() Each new foster home brings a new universe for Astrid to try to mold herself into, with her mother attempting to play marionette master from prison, so that Astrid must continually re-learn how to survive in a world that feels no obligation for her protection. It could be a classic coming-of-age story, except that Astrid is dragged through hell time and time again in a journey toward adulthood that isn’t “classic” in any sense of the word. ![]() White Oleander tells the story of a reticent adolescent girl named Astrid who grows up first under the crushing, dazzling shadow of her larger-than-life poet mother, then in a motley array of various foster homes. But be warned: the novel’s magnetism comes not from a quick pace or easy humor, but rather a harrowing, heartbreaking plot–at times slow, but never boring–and a cast of characters who will make you alternately praise and question modern humanity, or as Fitch puts it, the “vastness of human suffering.” White Oleander by Janet Fitch falls squarely into the second category. There are two types of books: those which you can abandon for a day or two when things get hectic, and those which become temporarily fused to your fingertips, making the trip with you to the coffee maker, the gym, and narrowly avoiding a watery grave when you switch from showers to baths so you can keep reading without sacrificing hygiene. ![]()
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