Astrid trails destruction and debris through three or four various foster homes, developing complicated and doomed relationships along the way that only serve to reaffirm her abandonment complex.

Because foster parents are all just terrible, messed-up people, either in it for the money or to fulfill some other need. Fitch's job at the beginning was to show us Ingrid through Astrid's eyes, and while she does a decent job of alluding to some of the disillusionment that begins to blossom when we hit pre-adolescence, she never lays a real foundation for understanding or feeling of Astrid's desperate, almost hysterical attachment to her mother - Astrid worships her mother's physicality (enormously sensual), her appreciation of aesthetics (somewhat Cali and cliche) and her poetry (just bad, actually).Īfter the murder, trial and subsequent imprisonment, Astrid is carted off to - wait for it - foster care! As the reader of any late 20th century novel knows well, this bodes the beginning of the 'real' story. Her mother, Ingrid, a 'poet', is wildly self-absorbed and disregards her daughter except when convenient. Astrid, the daughter, worships her mother based (as we find out later in a kind of tangental and almost unnecessary addition to the denouement) on some major abandonment issues. The heroine is a supposedly precocious 12?-year-old girl whose mother, jilted, murders her old lover using some pretty romantic and home-remedy style poisons. I don't review books to keep them a secret from people who haven't read them I review them to share my opinions with people who have.

And while the story line did manage to keep me up and at it until 2 am last night, I must say: I'm unconvinced.Īlso, spoilers. Due in part, perhaps, to the influx of 'unfortunate teenage girl' novels in the mid-to-late nineties (I think here of books like _She's Come Undone_ and _The Virgin Suicides_), I avoided Fitch's book for a while (the Oprah's Book Club stigma also contributed).

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