Astrid will continually measure herself against the standards of her mother's beauty and fearlessness (and find herself lacking) while at the Ingrid assumes a kind of mythic stature in her daughter's imagination. Fitch is more concerned with the ghostlike role that the ferocious Ingrid plays in her daughter's memory once she has left for prison. Simpson carefully delineated the day-to-day life shared by her heroine and her heroine's Only lacks the nuanced, psychological detail of "Anywhere" but it also tries to do something very different. The picaresque story of her journey through Los Angeles' labyrinthine foster care system, while chronicling her efforts to come to terms with her formidable and frightening mother.Īlthough the mother-daughter portrait in these pages will doubtless be compared to the one Mona Simpson drew in her powerful 1986 novel "Anywhere but Here," the two books vary widely in their effects. Ingrid has long since dumped the father of her daughter, Astrid and with her mother's arrest and sentencing to prison, 12-year old Astrid suddenly finds herself without a family. The murder that takes place in the opening pages of "White Oleander" is committed by the narrator's mother, an imperious, narcissistic poet named Ingrid Magnussen who poisons her boyfriend Barry when he tries It is a place where lovers who kill one another "blame it on the wind." It is a place painted in the colors of film noir, a place where the hot wind smells of laurel and creosote, and the Fitch's L.A., sowing fires and migraines and discord. The Santa Ana winds blow relentlessly in Ms.
Hite Oleander," Janet Fitch's affecting but overwrought first novel, is set in a Los Angeles that's part James M.
Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned-becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.Īvailable from Hachette Audio as a digital download, and in Hardcover and Ebook from Little Brown and Company.'White Oleander': Mother's in Jail, But Her Daughter Is the PrisonerīOOKS OF THE TIMES 'White Oleander': Mother's in Jail, But Her Daughter Is the Prisoner By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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