Book Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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 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 old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town - and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost... Ref: Booktopia, Australia

The Author:

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, won the Hopwood Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the American Library Association's Alex Award. She is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ref: Booktopia, Australia

Reviews:

*Little Fires Everywhere is a straight-up thriller...From the beginning, Ng's confident use of the omniscient voice signals that this is a writer in total control...While the plot whisks you breathlessly along, it lays out the bones of a debate about race and parenthood "Sunday Times, Pick of the Paperbacks"

*A free spirit shakes up a complacent community in this wry, beautifully observed novel...One of Ng's strengths is that she makes virtue and normality as fascinating as venality and eccentricity...It is beautifully written "The Times"

*Stellar...The plot is tightly structured, full of echoes and convergence, the characters bound together by a growing number of thick, overlapping threads....Ng is a confident, talented writer, and it's a pleasure to inhabit the lives of her characters and experience the rhythms of Shaker Heights through her clean, observant prose. Before she became an author she was a miniaturist - almost too perfect for a writer of suburban fiction - and there's a lovely, balanced, dioramic quality to this novel. She toggles between multiple points of view, creating a narrative both broad in scope and fine in detail, all while keeping the story moving at a thriller's pace "LA Times"

Our Review:

Well, what a surprise this book became as the simple story about small-town America and mother’s love slowly developed into a continual display of opposing views on so many family and community values. The main area of disagreement in the book was the rights of a natural mother over that of adoptive parents; the advantages and disadvantages for the child of living with either. Also Elena’s treatment of her youngest child, Izzy was a continuing theme through-out the book, climaxing in Izzy’s disastrous act of rebellion her setting fire to the family home and running away. Elena believed she was protecting Izzy from the mistakes she had made but instead she was alienating her. Like the title suggests this book was full of little fires between the characters and a free spirited Mia and the conservative Elena. The book club members took part in a robust discussion of the book and we discussed many of the opposing views the author presents throughout the storyline. I found this book easy to read, but quite compelling. I would recommend as a good read.