I really didn't have time to discover a book this good at this moment: it is finals week!! I have the distinct feeling that sometime in the recent past I read another book that unexpectedly left me thinking, "Wow, that was a good book." I'm not finding it in the last couple of months of this blog - unless it was the way I felt after rereading People of the Book.
This was remarkable. Depressing, but remarkable. And not without redemption in the end. The narrator is a young girl whose mother is totally single-minded in her insistence on having her own way at all costs. When that way leads her to obsession, murder, and life in prison, we find the daughter, whose name we don't even know for some time, thrust into the foster care system and imprinting on a series of "mothers" on her journey.
It is a fascinating view of the diversity which can exist within a small area, because, except for Astrid's memories of places around the world, the action is in Los Angeles. The oleander itself becomes in some sense a metaphor for LA - embodying, as it does, both incredible beauty and deadly poison - as it does for Astrid's mother who uses it as a murder weapon.
Astrid does survive and does eventually face life on her own terms, once she discovers that she is permitted - even required - to do so. In the process, she learns the hard truth that while our pasts are part of us and unchangeable, what we make of them is our own call.
No comments:
Post a Comment