She stopped when she got under the overhang, and I didn’t move, I wanted her to see who I was now. If anything, it is a blind and callous parent, only looking after the immediate physical needs of Astrid rather than considering the emotional effects its care, or lack thereof, has on her. Over time, Astrid loses her innocence, as Ingrid realizes when 17-year-old Astrid visits her in prison. The foster system proves to be a poor replacement. In fact, she longs for this home: “It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn’t stop humming, or loving someone I could never have.”Īstrid and her mother in the movie adaptation of White Oleander “They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away.”Įven if this conclusion is correct, the idea of a universal mother doesn’t erase the pull a flesh-and-blood mother has on her child. “I am your home,” Ingrid once told Astrid, and Astrid finds this statement to be true, no matter how hard she tries to escape it. Astrid concludes that women don’t call for their actual mothers, the women who had let them down. Even with husbands at their sides, they called out for mama. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. She hadn’t seen her mother in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. I didn’t know why she would call for her mother. She sits in the hospital beside her friend Yvonne when Yvonne is in labor, and she is surprised when Yvonne calls out for her mother during contractions.

Astrid isn’t the only person who can’t escape the connection to her mother. Throughout the book, as Astrid attempts to survive both physically and emotionally, the reader gets the sense that all her choices are somehow linked to her mother – whether Astrid is trying to be like Ingrid, rebel against her, or fill the hole left by her absence. “And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful. While she shoots, she is aware he is watching her. With every experience, she relates how she is feeling back to her mother. For example, “Uncle Ray,” the live-in boyfriend of her first foster mother, teaches her to shoot a gun. Each place she lands brings a bizarre cast of characters and an insane amount of trauma. Astrid’s six-year journey through the California foster system begins. Her 12-year-old daughter, Astrid, spends a week on a neighbor’s couch waiting for her mother to come back from being arrested before the police show up for her.

After stalking him and breaking into his home, she murders him. In the novel, Ingrid Magnussen, a brilliant poet and unconventional woman, becomes obsessively vindictive when a lover rejects her.

White oleander novel