Paperback: 480 pages Publisher: Back Bay Books; Mti edition (May 1, 2000
Genre: Young Adult Source: Library
Rating;
"How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention."
My Thoughts: I read this book many years ago, so you will have to pardon me if I don't get the odd bit here and there right. The ironic thing is that I was Astrid's age when I first read this book, and after reading it I realised how naive and lucky I really was.
The book when introducing Astrid's mother - Ingrid describes her almost as this beautiful, vulnerable and very strong minded women with a sort of elegance. Even as you read along you seem to get lost in her beauty, she comes across just as mesmerising as her daughter describes her. You can see from Astrid's point of view how much she looks up and admires her mother and her beauty. Her mother is poetic, loving but strangely cruel. One could almost call the women a little bipolar or maybe she is just completely mad?
As an arrogant feminist Ingrid has always lived by rules. Do not get attached to men, don’t let them stay the night, do what you want to do and leave them which is why Astrid is a little confused when she slowly starts to break those rules when it comes to her current boyfriend who she deems unworthy of her mother. She takes it a step further though. Upon discovering that her boyfriend is a womaniser she is embarrassed and goes to the extreme in murdering him. This one mistake will lead to her daughter suffering throughout her life.
As her mother is thrown in jail her daughter is taken from one foster home to another. Mostly the families are on the poor side, on drugs, or consist of abusers. She will be mauled by dogs, shot, and starved. Although she converses with her mother through letters, with the little she has been taught from her mother and thorough the hardships she faces they are able to make her stronger, a little rougher around the edges, and most importantly learn survival skills which she will need throughout the book. She suffers immensely in these years until you finally see that once young, naive girl slip away. Her innocence is lost and with that so is the Astrid we once knew.
During each foster home she is sent to she conforms to the environment and latches on to anyone who gives her the slightest smile or sense of warmth, but after facing one heartbreak after another, after being betrayed and rejected she is eventually left traumatised and left to count only on herself to survive on her own. Through this time she experiments with her sexuality which threw me off since she was just merely a child. Although it's a bit amusing looking back now at how I thought that way when I was the very same age as her. Although she becomes more independent because of this she also becomes just as mysterious as her mother.
As the reader I wanted to sympathise with her, she goes through absolute hell through every foster home she goes, but the lack of emotion in Astrid and feeling leaves the reader perplexed as to who Astrid really is. The reason why her mother is so mysterious to us also is because Astrid does not really know her well herself, she makes an unreliable narrator because you often get the feeling that we only know what Astrid wants us to know.
Astrid loves her mother regardless of all that she has done to her. Her mother is a selfish woman though. She would rather Astrid suffered through life than be happy with someone else, throughout the book it becomes clear just how far this women is willing to go to ensure this. It’s very disturbing and the only thing I can think of is that she is the result of a new type of selfishness that I would not wish to befall on anyone. Despite how horrible she is, there is something quite hypnotic about her, something I can’t quite place even now. The very something which made Astrid love her mother all this time despite everything.
Her will to be loved is heart-wrenching and so saddening. After all the heartache she has faced and after being hurt so many times you would think she would have completely given up on the world itself, but she lingers on for some time, waiting and wanting. She finds something with Paul, and although it’s obvious that he loves her, it was never fully clear to me if she loved him.
Up until that point she is so numb to everything that I had to doubt if she was even with him because she loved him. I even questioned whether she ever cared for him. The ending may be satisfying to some, and although we see her eventually become a women before our eyes which is a great moment, something felt missing. I realised that I didn’t believe in the ending because I believed that her heart wasn’t in the decision she made in the end. She made it because she felt she had no other alternative. She would make due with what she had but it didn’t seem that she necessarily wanted it. After rooting for her for so long I wanted more for her than that, and this got to me.
White Oleander bothers me even now. I still find myself trying to figure Ingrid and Astrid out; they are so mysterious, so peculiar, that I never really felt like I got to know them even remotely. I don’t like not knowing my characters; it makes me a little uncomfortable.
What made this book so memorable was probably the fact that it was one of the first that I took a little something away with me, a lesson. The first book I became emotionally invested in. It’s heavy-dark theme weighed hard on my 12 year self, and although leaving me quite depressed it also left me very impressed. I might have been quite too young to understand the book fully at such a age, or even to read such a heavy story, but I walked away a better person and appreciating life a little more. There is a reason that Astrid's story has been ingrained in my mind for five years. Despite Astrid’s flaws she is the girl that every other young girl has the potential to become if neglected, her story is one that needs to be told and learnt from.
"In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show."
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