infryq reviewed White Oleander by Janet Fitch
Review of 'White Oleander' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
"I would always know what time it was in California."
I wonder, did she despise that final sentence? Did it seem stale, vapidly hopeful against her inner passages?:
At Claire's, I'd begun to think of my life as a series of Kandinsky pencil sketches, meaningless by themselves, but arranged together they would begin to form an elegant composition. I even thought I had seen the shape of the future in them. But now I had lost too many pieces. They had returned to a handful of pine needles on a forest floor, unreadable.
Truth came wtih sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
My mother was a woman people stopped in the …
"I would always know what time it was in California."
I wonder, did she despise that final sentence? Did it seem stale, vapidly hopeful against her inner passages?:
At Claire's, I'd begun to think of my life as a series of Kandinsky pencil sketches, meaningless by themselves, but arranged together they would begin to form an elegant composition. I even thought I had seen the shape of the future in them. But now I had lost too many pieces. They had returned to a handful of pine needles on a forest floor, unreadable.
Truth came wtih sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
My mother was a woman people stopped in the market to wonder at. Not like Starr, but just at the sheer beauty. They seemed startled she had to shop and eat like anyone else. I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mother's. I wouldn't dare. It would be too scary.
It hadn't occurred to me the worst was yet to come, until my prescription ran out. I had foolishly doubled my dose, and now I lay shipwrecked on a desolate shore littered with broken glass.
Man. It's been a shit year for being satisfied with the endings of novels.
On the other hand, White Oleander regularly hits you with language so beautiful, a bucket of ice water to the face would be calming (the above selections were obtained by opening the book at random). So I suppose I can't complain too much. Anyone who's been languishing in Terry Pratchett and Dan Brown and other merely entertaining fiction should give it a try.
