Review: White Oleander by Janet Fitch

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“Let me tell you a few things about regret…There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”

Release Date: July 1999

Genre(s): Adult fiction, Contemporary

Publisher: Little Brown and Company

Pages: 446

Rating:⭐️⭐️⭐️.25

Synopsis

White Oleander tells the story of Ingrid, a poet and mother who is arrested for the murder of her ex-boyfriend, and Astrid, her daughter. After her mother is imprisoned for murder, Astrid travels from home to home in the foster care system; each adding to her self-discovery and understanding of life as she knows it.

Review

Usually, I am quick to write reviews, but after reading White Oleander, it’s taken me quite a bit of time to summarize my thoughts clearly. While I read this book rather quickly, it was emotionally very intense and difficult to process. Oftentimes I had to take breaks from reading after heavy scenes in order to fully process what I read before moving on. This book does quite a bit to show just how flawed the foster care system is and how difficult it can be for children to end up in this system. However, there are some ways I wish White Oleander would have handled certain scenes better.

Something in particular that really struck me about Astrid’s living situations was that she was always put into adult situations despite still being a child. In each living situation, she was put into positions where she had to respond in ways where the parent(s) should have stepped in. These things interfered with her ability to carry out her life as a teenager and impacted her future as well.

And while I enjoyed this book overall, where I struggled in writing this review primarily involved some of the ways Astrid’s situations were written. In particular, I feel like the entire situation with Ray and the dynamics of that relationship needed to be handled more carefully than they were. That situation in itself and its impacts on Astrid could have been a whole book in itself, but instead, it feels like it was written (as well as the very shocking consequences of it) to create shock value and movement within the plot.

Similarly, I think that Astrid’s movement to worst-case scenario homes each time she was moved burnt out the story after some time. After the first incident, I expected that each subsequent home would lead to some equally as insane situation, and it did. And while there are a lot of issues with the foster care system and I see the realism of quite a bit of what happened in White Oleander, I feel like this book could have better handled what the impacts of those were on the character. But instead, we essentially watch her suffer through the whole thing and get what feels like a swift ending. We get bits and pieces of how her experiences shaped her, but I feel like this needed to happen way more in the book than it did. After the first incident, there’s no exploration of her trauma or recovery or how those events impacted her mentally. Instead, she just goes on to the next part of her life where she continues to be mistreated by the next host(s). I really think we needed more time for Astrid to process those moments because although she’s become desensitized to a lot of things over the course of her young life, the way those things impact her is not discussed as much. The only way we do see this is with her relationship with her mother. And if the other traumatic experiences she had were explored with the same depth as her relationship with her mother, I think this would have been a much better book.

So I did enjoy White Oleander overall but also wish certain elements of the story were fleshed out more. I think that this book emphasized plot points over characterization in certain parts where it shouldn’t have, but where it did the story flowed and was better able to illustrate Astrid’s experiences, as well as the issues within the foster care system.