“White Oleander”
by Janet Fitch
Published: May 2000
ISBN: 0316284955

(Updated: June 9, 2007.)

From Google…

A New York Times Bestseller Astrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery — but their idyll is shattered when Ingrid falls apart over a lover. Deranged by rejection, she murders the man, and is sentenced to life in prison. “White Oleander” is the unforgettable story of Astrid’s journey through a series of foster homes and her efforts to find a place for herself in impossible circumstances. Each home is its own universe, with a new set of laws and lessons to be learned. With determination and humor, Astrid confronts the challenges of loneliness and poverty, and strives to learn who a motherless child in an indifferent world can become.

Emotionally brilliant.

When I was growing up, the family in the house behind/beside us had taken in two foster kids. One of them became a good friend of mine. I still remember my shock of discovering the truth about some parents through our relationship. I suppose that since then, no since before then, I have been curious about the emotions of this.

I have always wondered about the line, the positioning of the line, the moment when the line between good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable “parenting” becomes clear enough and present enough to make crossing it possible. I have wondered when the crossing became “obvious” enough to allow or insist reacting to it from a societal point of view. I have always seen the separation of child from parent as huge and not always dependent on physicality. And not only am I still curious, I am more curious now that I have a bunch more stories and experiences to add into the mix.

To that end, I picked up this book “hoping”. I have had it on my shelves for a while and passed over it on several occasions. I really wanted it to not be “obvious”. I suppose by obvious I mean simple in a bad versus good sense and I was so not disappointed.

I found this book to be an amazing telling of emotions, an amazing telling of emotional experience in all the depths and layering of this. We are, at our best, “all of us”. We do, at our best, draw on all of us to choose our next step. We all come from perfectly imperfect parents. And, if we ourselves are parents, at our best we are perfectly imperfect as well. This book is about all of that.

I definitely recommend reading this. It is a four out of five hearts on my scale.