White Oleander

Janet Fitch’s novel opens as Astrid, a teenager, watches her brilliant, cold poet mother go to prison for poisoning a lover. Astrid is then handed from one foster home to another across Los Angeles, and each household reshapes her a little, for better and worse. Fitch writes in vivid, sensory prose about survival and the long shadow a mother can cast, following a girl slowly learning to become her own person.