White Oleander A Novel

"White Oleander is a painfully beautiful first novel about a young girl growing up the hard way. It is a powerful story of mothers and daughters, their ambiguous alliances, their selfish love and cruel behaviour, and the search for love and identity. Astrid has been raised by her mother Ingrid, a headstrong poet, a free spirit given to pretentious pronouncements who wilfully neglects her daughter and overlooks her motherly duties. Astrid forgives her everything: her world revolves around this beautiful creature. Then Ingrid murders a former lover and is imprisoned for life. Astrid becomes a foster child who has to learn to steel her way through a changed reality of guns, drugs, suicide and dysfunctional families. Although for a brief time she does find a 'mother' who gives her back some sense of herself, her life is mostly one of being shunted from home to home - a trailer park, a turquoise suburban bungalow, a low rent hovel. But Astrid's mother has given her daughter a fierce determination to survive. Astrid's gift is to teach her mother about love." -back cover.