Janet Finch's White Oleander is a poignant story of artistry and self-identification

Look beyond the cover of Janet Finch's novel White Oleander. When the novel was made into a feature film last year starring four picture-perfect blonds -- Ren?©e Zellweger, Michelle Fiefer, Robin Wright Penn, and Allison Lohman - the four starlets were digitally plastered onto the front cover. Ironically, such a cover suggests the very image of marred beauty that White Oleander elegantly portrays.

In her debut book, Janet Finch has created real characters in real places. Astrid, the only child of single mother Ingrid, idolizes her mother, whose sharp beauty, and killer instincts, ultimately lead to a life in prison the result of love gone wrong. At the age of 12, Astrid finds herself lost in an indifferent world that doesn't track the progress of foster children and leaves her to duke it out on her own.

The Hollywood commercialization of White Oleander is a cheap abstraction of the poetic brilliance of a novel that captures subtleties of life that emerge from a young girl's journey through the California foster care system.

White Oleander is a book laced with domineering female characters, hard-poetic language, and a complex plot. It puts your average daytime soap opera to shame. Undertaking her own battles of trial and error with her placement in eight different foster homes, Astrid fights to stay afloat.

The novel's critical themes of struggles with the past and formation of self are manifested through letters to Astrid that Ingrid writes from her prison cell. "The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge" writes Ingrid --a metaphor that is sustained throughout the book. As both mother and daughter encounter their own struggles each finds solace in art -- one in words and the other in paintings.

White Oleander is laced with universal themes, one of which -- the struggle of self-emergence in a conformist society-- is coupled with an adroit mastery of language and character development. Furthermore, the novel tactfully portrays the necessary function of art as an emotional outlet for these issues.

This novel has reality at its base: Finch, a third generation Los Angeles resident, spent years crafting White Oleander during which time she interviewed multiple orphanage facilities, social workers, and foster care children.

White Oleander deals with one of the major themes of our age: the construction of self. Sung through Finch's lucid descriptions of Ingrid's own struggles, the readers' past is also called into question. What does the past mean? Where does it lead? When does the past end and the future begin?

Finch's novel poses questions not only within its protagonist's journey, but also through its seductive language. She draws the reader in, and extends her central questions to the reader as well. Finch picks the reader up immediately on page one and 390 pages later drops the reader off with a crash,- forcing him or her to deal with personal issues of self, past, and future.

White Oleander is the antithesis of Hollywood. It is real. It is poetic. Its complex plot, well established characters, and universal themes, make it far more intricate than any film reel could ever reproduce. The plot itself is intriguing, but the way it is written -- underscoring the juxtaposition of Ingrid against her mother and the internal thoughts of Ingrid -- are what makes the book great.

These subtleties of the written word are exactly what Hollywood will never be able to capture. The novel recognizes this problem through its character's own comments. "[Berlin] wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time," Ingrid reflects. "We hadn't learned yet, there was no such thing as an empty canvas." This novel challenges the reader's sense of self, something that Hollywood embellishments will never do it justice.