Books like White Oleander
What should you read after Janet Fitch’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Janet Fitch
- 1999
- Literary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after White Oleander
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
A girl without a mother is taken in by women who are better at it, in the same hot, sensory prose, arguing the same case about who actually raises you.
- Women who fail her differently
- Sentences like poetry
- A daughter becoming an artist
- Warmer and more redemptive
Great matchGirl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
Kaysen's cool, watchful account of being a young woman placed in other people's custody sits close to Astrid's habit of studying every room she is put in.
- Growing up without protection
- One foster home after another
- Sentences like poetry
- Memoir, and fragmentary
Best for the sentencesThe Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Plath's novel is the pressure system Fitch's book grew out of: a young woman's mind rendered in images so good they hurt, with nobody able to help.
- Sentences like poetry
- Growing up without protection
- Women who fail her differently
- The fifties, no foster care
Best for the true versionThe Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
Walls actually lived a version of Astrid's childhood — brilliant, negligent parents and no safety anywhere — and reports it without a shred of self-pity.
- Growing up without protection
- A mother who poisons everything
- One foster home after another
- Memoir, much plainer prose
Worth a look — with a warningThe Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
The same era, the same appetite for beauty laid over something terrible, and a family that cannot reassemble itself. The narration is the leap you must take.
- Sentences like poetry
- Growing up without protection
- Los Angeles as a character
- Narrated from the afterlife
Great matchThe Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
Here for the voice rather than the plot: an adolescent narrator who sees straight through every adult in the room and has nowhere safe to put that.
- Growing up without protection
- One foster home after another
- A daughter becoming an artist
- A boy, fifties New York
Worth a look — with a warningSpeak
Laurie Halse Anderson
Anderson's narrator makes art because she cannot make sentences, which is Astrid's exact method, compressed into one short and ferocious school year.
- A daughter becoming an artist
- Growing up without protection
- Sentences like poetry
- Rape and its aftermath
Best for the parent questionThe Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
Four daughters and a father whose convictions wreck them, told in voices that never agree. The same interrogation of a parent's damage, on a continental scale.
- A mother who poisons everything
- Sentences like poetry
- Women who fail her differently
- The Congo, 1959, and political
Great matchThe Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Suburban girls destroyed by the adults meant to keep them safe, in prose every bit as gorgeous and as unnerving as Fitch's. Very short, very strange.
- Sentences like poetry
- Growing up without protection
- A mother who poisons everything
- A collective 'we' narration
Great matchThe Color Purple
Alice Walker
Letters from a girl with nobody, passed between households, who eventually writes her way into a self. The severest version of Astrid's arc.
- Growing up without protection
- Women who fail her differently
- A daughter becoming an artist
- Epistolary, in dialect
Best for mothers and daughtersThe Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan
Four pairs of mothers and daughters misunderstanding each other, some of it accidental and some of it not. Less violent than Fitch, as unsparing about inheritance.
- Women who fail her differently
- A mother who poisons everything
- Letters from prison
- An ensemble, no single heroine
Worth a look — with a warningBastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison
Allison writes a girl failed by every adult around her in language as beautiful as Fitch's and considerably harder to sit through. The closest match, and the toughest.
- Growing up without protection
- A mother who poisons everything
- Sentences like poetry
- Explicit child abuse
Great matchWe Were Liars
E. Lockhart
The young-adult reading of the same material: a girl, a family that damages politely, and a summer she has to reconstruct. Faster and much less bleak.
- Sentences like poetry
- Growing up without protection
- Women who fail her differently
- Thriller structure with a twist
What should you read after White Oleander?
White Oleander by Janet Fitch works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd — a girl without a mother is taken in by women who are better at it, in the same hot, sensory prose, arguing the same case about who actually raises you.
If what stayed with you was growing up without protection, read Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen instead: kaysen's cool, watchful account of being a young woman placed in other people's custody sits close to Astrid's habit of studying every room she is put in. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is the other strong option — plath's novel is the pressure system Fitch's book grew out of: a young woman's mind rendered in images so good they hurt, with nobody able to help.
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