Little Fires Everywhere has been on my TBR since it won Best Fiction for the 2017 Goodreads Choice Awards. I finally picked it up thanks to #Buzzwordathon, a readathon hosted in March by BooksandLala.

“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”

About The Book

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When the Richardsons’ friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family – and Mia’s.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of long-held secrets and the ferocious pull of motherhood-and the danger of believing that planning and following the rules can avert disaster, or heartbreak.

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”

My Review

Little Fires Everywhere takes place in a planned suburb called Shaker Heights, Ohio (where the author grew up).

The Richardsons
>Elena: 3rd generation Shaker Heights resident, writer for the local newspaper, mother. She plays by the rules.
>Bill: Elena’s husband, lawyer
>Lexie: Elena and Bill’s eldest child, senior in high school. She’s curious, naive, stressed about college and looking forward to leaving Shaker Heights.
>Trip: second oldest, athlete
>Moody: a little awkward, he becomes Pearl’s best friend
>Izzy: the youngest, feels unloved by her mother, black sheep, impulsive

The Warrens
>Mia: extremely talented photographer and artist, resourceful 36 year-old single mother with a mysterious past
>Pearl: Mia’s daughter, same age as Moody. Aspiring poet.

The McCulloughs
>Linda: childhood friend of Elena
>Mirabelle/May Ling: Linda’s adopted baby

Bebe Chow: May Ling’s biological mother

After living a nomadic lifestyle for almost two decades Mia has promised her daughter, Pearl, that they’ll be staying put. Almost a year after moving into the Richardson’s rental house, Mia and Pearl have left and the Richardson’s family home has burned down.  As we discover who set the house on fire, why Mia and Pearl left, and what happens with the custody battle for baby Mirabelle/May Ling, we are given a page-turning story about racial tension, family dynamics, secrets, sex, childbirth, adoption, abortion, miscarriage, and motherhood.

“The firemen said there were little fires everywhere”.

I love the way even the minor characters like the neighbor have so much personality. Every single character has their own fire to put out. There was a lot going on with the plot, but I never felt overwhelmed.

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.”

Little Fires Everywhere is engaging and heart-breaking. I can’t wait to read more by Celeste Ng! I think fans of Jodi Picoult would really like this, and it would create great discussions for a book club.

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About The Author

“Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the ALA’s Alex Award, and the Medici Book Club Prize, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Celeste attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.

Currently, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, will be published by Penguin Press in fall 2017.”

https://www.celesteng.com/

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