White Oleander
Submitted by Gail Mooney (profile)

Title and Author: White Oleander by Janet Fitch
Genre: Novel
Themes: Overcoming adversity, finding one's voice or one's strength, inheriting patterns of behavior

White Oleander is a long, compelling story about a young girl whose mother is a poet and an artist, self-involved and vaguely crazy. When the girl is 12, the mother murders a boyfriend who has left her and is sent to prison, thus beginning the girl's entry into the foster care system in which she lives in five foster homes in six years. She is sexually seduced at thirteen, mistreated, starved, and, in one home, loved and nurtured before the foster mother commits suicide. It is a story about loss and strength and what gets the girl through her teenaged years, which is her art and, ultimately, her sense of being "above it all," both of which are skills she got from her mother.

It is a tale of development: sexually, emotionally, intellectually, and culturally this girl goes from the formless years of adolescence to the rage and alienation of the mid-teen years and, finally, to the acceptance of self, that maturity of late teens and early twenties, all amidst a backdrop of chaos and insecurity, living with nothing in "the land of plenty."

She is beautiful and doesn't know it, she is extremely intelligent and is never given a chance to use her intelligence, and she is a gifted artist but no one cares except for the one foster mother who makes all the difference. This woman, however, cannot save herself from her own monsters, which is the pivotal point of the girl's life and of the book.

We read this story midway through the course, and it usually turns out to be one of the favorites because it is a great read and because of the issues it raises for the women, some of which follow.

Questions:

Where do teenaged girls get their strength?
How much can an adult influence a young girl?
When girls picture themselves, from what sources do they get positive images?
How is it possible both to hate and to love someone?
In what ways do women allow men to define them?
Where do girls find the strength to resist peer pressure and media influences?
How do violence and poverty inform the choices we make in life?