Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere

In the placid, progressive suburb of Shaker Heights everything is meticulously planned, from 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. Mia Warren, an enigmatic artist and single mother, 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 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. 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.

In her experience, when someone tried to do something for her, it came from either pity or distrust, but this simple gesture felt like what it was: a small kindness, with no strings attached.

"Being allowed to do something and knowing how to do it are not the same thing."

“Lexie’s got a good brain. She just doesn’t always use it in real life.”

They were so artlessly beautiful, even right out of bed.

and to his delight he found in Pearl another poetic soul.

So it would feel to him that he had always known her name, that somehow, he and Pearl had known each other always.

“A community is known by the schools it keeps.”

—she appreciated his thoughtfulness anyway. Mr. Yang was exactly the kind of tenant Mrs. Richardson wanted: a kind person to whom she could do a kind turn, and who would appreciate her kindness.

and she rented only to people she felt were deserving but who had, for one reason or another, not quite gotten a fair shot in life. 

"Traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives"--

Anna

Remember, Mia had said: 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. 

betty books

Little fires everywhere [sound recording]

I needed more and not in a good way👎🏾

🥔

This is one of my favorite books. I have decided. It is not only about one thing but shows life for every single character and I love it. I just love it. I definitely have to read it again sometime in the future.

Kiran Aftab

How does a person even come up with a story like this oh my god?! This was insane and the amount of time celeste probably spent making all of these different connections between the characters play out the way that they did must have taken forever. Also this book hurt me but in a different way you know what I mean... damn

Ryan Mateyk

POPSUGAR 2020: A book by a WOC 

This book falls nicely into my favourite genre of desperate housewives.

Bria

Includes a conversation with author, discussion questions, and a "letter" from author.

Ditipriya Acharya

I had been meaning to read this book ever since the TV series was announced, mostly because I’m one of those snobs who needs to read the book first. However, even though I started reading it multiple times I could never go beyond the first 2 chapters. This was not due to the writing, I actually quite enjoyed Ng’s style and so I may give her first book a try sometime this year, but somehow I didn’t quite gel with the flow of the story itself. 

In 2021 I have decided to give the books that I started and didn’t finish another go and the first book that I picked up as part of this project was this one. I pushed through the first 2 chapters and after that it was quite a pleasant read, if not slightly mediocre. The book is often described as a literary thriller and is told in multiple timelines. I ended up enjoying some timelines more than others, particularly the section that described Mia’s past. The main plot, concerning the Richardson and Wright teens, however fell a little flat. I was not invested in it and some of the actions of the younger characters annoyed me. I also would have liked for the book to have a better resolution. While I generally enjoy books with ambiguous endings this one felt a little incomplete to me. 

Having said that, I did enjoy the McCullough / Chow storyline and the topics that it explored like motherhood, cultural identity and the question of whether parents can possibly raise adoptive children of a different race in a manner that is respectful to their birth culture. The detail in which this part of the story was told reflected what I think are Ng’s own experiences as someone with immigrant parents in America. 

While there were things about the book that I liked, I have a feeling in the long run there’s going to be little about the book that will stick with me. Overall, I thought this was a pleasant read but not a particularly memorable one.

I enjoyed this one for the most part. I wished it was a little more fast-paced, but, overall I enjoyed the characters and the way the story unfolded. I found mrs richardson to be a deeply unlikable busybody but her children made up for it. I also wasn’t crazy about the ending because I feel like we had a lot left unanswered. do may ling and bebe have a happy life? or are they going to always be on the run from the past much like mia and pearl? what happens to izzy? does she find mia and pearl? does she go back to the richardsons? does mrs richardson finally treat her better? do mia and pearl ever get to actually settle down somewhere and stay there? how does mia’s reunion with her parents go? does pearl like her grandparents? do they like pearl? SO. MANY. QUESTIONS. 

anyway. the story was good. I was just left wanting more.

emily learmont

I enjoyed this one for the most part. I wished it was a little more fast-paced, but, overall I enjoyed the characters and the way the story unfolded. I found mrs richardson to be a deeply unlikable busybody but her children made up for it. I also wasn’t crazy about the ending because I feel like we had a lot left unanswered. do may ling and bebe have a happy life? or are they going to always be on the run from the past much like mia and pearl? what happens to izzy? does she find mia and pearl? does she go back to the richardsons? does mrs richardson finally treat her better? do mia and pearl ever get to actually settle down somewhere and stay there? how does mia’s reunion with her parents go? does pearl like her grandparents? do they like pearl? SO. MANY. QUESTIONS. 

anyway. the story was good. I was just left wanting more.

Chloé

Haikal Satria

Was nothing like I expected, even though I expected nothing. Would read again.

Sarah Sammis

The book opens with one of these idyllic houses burning to the ground, set fire by one of its residents. The remainder of the book is the unwinding of events to point to what could drive a suburban family to such extremes.

The event that changed everything, that set the dominoes to fall, was the arrival of Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl. They are renting one of the upstairs apartments in the homes that are duplexes made to look like one. Mia is an artist.

336633 - family home Blue Highway

http://pussreboots.com/blog/2020/comm...

Lindy

Little Fires Everywhere has a lot in common with Peyton Place: Women writers exposing the hidden hypocrisies of the communities in which they were raised! Discussion of social inequalities! Hopping between points of view! Vignettes of peripheral characters! Children of mysterious parentage! House fires! Newspaper reporters! Characters that rarely deviate from stock archetypes of contemporary fiction! Plotlines that teeter over the edge into melodrama! (view spoiler)[Teenagers dying in car wrecks! Abortion! (hide spoiler)]

Little Fires Everywhere does differ from Peyton Place in two significant respects, though. First, the writing in Peyton Place is uneven and frequently clunky, while Celeste Ng's prose is intensely competent and polished like most of the bestsellers that have been billed as great for bookclubs over the last ten years. Second, while Peyton Place was truly incendiary in its time, Little Fires Everywhere remains disappointingly pedestrian; very little in it challenged me. (view spoiler)[I actually find it kind of concerning that Mia, who is positioned as the moral center of the story to the point she's compared to the Virgin Mary, says that an abortion is a sad event that's going to follow Lexie through the rest of her life after years earlier experiencing a desire out of nowhere to be a mother due to... getting screamed at by her parents? feeling the necessity of family after the death of her brother? the miracle of pregnancy? The book is more conservative than it thinks, and the turning point needed more elaboration. What if, upon realizing that surrogacy is unethical, Mia had elected to terminate the pregnancy? What if Bebe had indeed had an abortion during the course of the court case? (hide spoiler)]

For what it's worth, my mother, who grew up the daughter of a poor single mother in a different planned community, loved this book. The bottom line for me that Little Fires Everywhere is far from being bad, but it is generic.

Hannah Yoon

I haven't really read a contemporary fiction in a while so I was a bit hesitant about starting this and wasn't sure if I'd finish.
But soon after I got started I wanted to finish this book in a few days but I didn't realize it would be in less than a day.
Ng did a beautiful job of weaving character development with the past and the present.
It was a bit hard to get into with the first two chapters, but soon after when Mia and Pearl were introduced and Ng went into their back story, I was hooked.

A Novel

** spoiler alert **
           don’t be mistaken, i enjoyed it. however the plot loses track and it gets into dramatic/unbelievable territory. it was, however, very interesting anyways. 

i’ll be thinking about bebe and her baby, hopefully living well and happy. and the wonderful family of mia, pearl and izzy.

Witty, sharp, and a quick read. I loved the style of writing, and the tangled stories drew you in.

Kendall Lobdell

Amelia Baumann

anticlimactic, plot was very boring, super predictable

Huiting Lim

entirely heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. already one of my all-time favourites; celeste ng you have done it again

JoAnna

Little Fires Everywhere reads like a movie, but better. Celeste does omniscient narration so well. Sometimes the sheer density of the writing slowed it down, but her hooks, and the way she closed out each scene, each chapter, made it worth the read. 

The ending of the novel absolutely delivered. Sometimes novels build really well before dropping the ball near the climax/denouement, but the novel maintained tension throughout. And I loved how Celeste's identity infiltrates her own story, the way she snakes three separate Cantonese characters into a tale about her Ohio suburb.

chloe rae

Ryan 

4.5 stars

celeste ng delivers another book that displays such beautiful storytelling and well-executed backgrounds and storylines for each character that i think nobody could do except her. i have never read a book so perfectly structured and written other than ng's other book "everything i never told you." although - unpopular opinion - i find her debut the best if i were to answer which book of hers was better, i'm looking forward to every novel, story, anything from her in the near future. i believe ng can truly deliver a story.

Julia Lundberg 

★★★ // this was interesting for the most part and i found myself moved by some of the little stories here—especially Mia’s backstory. but it also felt cold, devoid of a spark that could have totally grabbed my attention. perhaps because it takes on too many side stories that it fails to fully capture character moments. perhaps because i wanted it to really tell us a story about motherhood. even though it did a pretty good job stirring a debate on the subject, i suppose it would have been more gripping if it involved the primary characters instead of a reflection on other people’s lives in the story. 
  ”Mia held her for a moment, buried her nose in the part of Pearl’s hair. Every time she did this, she was comforted by how Pearl smelled exactly the same. She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she’d carried alongside her.”

hileahrious

Objectively, a very well-written book, and in terms of how real the story is I can appreciate it (it touched me on a few different levels). It features a town I’m very familiar with, so personally it was groovy to connect with the setting. However, it seemed pretty predictable, especially in terms of character development, but as I think Ng tries to reflect a potential reality as accurately as possible, it makes sense that some characters are awful and some dilemmas make you feel icky. That’s just life. It is a reminder of how very little you actually know about those around you.

Still, something was lacking for me. I’d recommend it if you’ve lived or spent time in Shaker Heights for funsies.

Sophie Wang

written with an omnipotent pov and ever expanding focus on past present and future this book created 20+ life sized characters each with dimension and motivations of their own. this was the book's most incredible feat bc for this reason there were no protagonists or antagonists even though it seemed there would be, as the reader was privy to all the insecurities behind the half-truths that led to conflict. 

beyond this, the book also comments on the suburban complicity / insulation from race, white saviorism, motherhood, saving face/social status, and the kindness / solidarity from being poor vs being privileged (which I can't word well but was something I had actually been thinking about a lot before this so I was delighted to see in the novel). 

I must say despite all the valiant attempts at humanizing her I still hated Elena Richardson, sorry! also bc this book basically only serves to explain the why they got to the point of the house burning down, there was no real satisfactory ending for any character but one, and I don't like open endings.

Little Fires Everywhere

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