Book Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
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I can’t quite figure out this book. There’s a lot of young adult, more than a smidge of chick lit and loads of mystery. It’s also beautifully written. But the most interesting character is frequently ignored by all the others as well as the author and so much of her is left unexplored and unexplained.
Mia Warren and her teenage daughter, Pearl, have just arrived in Shaker Heights, Ohio. It’s a planned community, a little progressive but a little Stepford at the same time. They rent a home from the Richardsons and immediately become entangled in their landlords’ lives. Mother Elena is a local reporter, father Bill is a lawyer and the kids are spoiled and mostly ungrateful. And the youngest, Izzy, is also frustratingly rebellious. The book opens with her burning down her family home (she sets “little fires everywhere”) and then rewinds to the day the Warrens moved into town to show how all the events before lead up to that moment.
The Richardson kids have never lived anywhere but Shaker Heights. Mia, an artist, and Pearl have never stayed longer than a year in one place and it’s usually more like four or six months. Once each art project is done, Mia needs to find inspiration in a new location. Or so she says. But Pearl wants to stay put this time.
Mia picks up work at a local Chinese restaurant to supplement the income from selling her pieces and when Mrs Richardson hears this, she insists Mia come work at her home as a part-time housekeeper, mornings and afternoons, to leave her plenty of time for her art. She thinks she’s doing her tenant a favour. But during her chores, when Mia overhears that friends of the Richardsons are in the middle of adopting an abandoned Chinese baby, she realises it’s the baby of one of her co-workers at the Chinese restaurant. A bout of postnatal depression made her think she couldn’t cope but she’s since received treatment and has been searching for her child for almost a year without success.
A court battle ensues. The community is divided. And Mrs Richardson knows Mia was the one who stirred up all this trouble. There’s something not quite right about her tenant. So she decides to find out who she really is.
Little Fires Everywhere is a literal title but it’s also metaphorical, a reference to how moments in people’s lives spark embers and can end up becoming an all-consuming fire when they join together and catch up with you if they aren’t put out. The sparks in this story are all the result of selfish actions and the all-consuming fire feels cleansing. I really struggled to feel much sympathy for any of them at all.
Except for Izzy. We barely see Izzy for most of the book but what we do see of her showed me she should have been the main character. Instead we are subjected to her siblings, moody Moody (what else can you expect when you name a character that?), popular Lexie and sporty Tripp. And Pearl slots into the family unit, wanting to be one of them, immediately shedding her outsider status and becoming boring, too.
The mothers are stereotypical, Mia artistic and cool, someone the kids can go to for advice and not be judged, Elena thinking she’s progressive when she’s actually settled into the comfortable white middle class. The fathers are stereotypical, too. Bill is at work most of the time and Mia’s father… well, she doesn’t actually know who her father is.
Half this book feels like what a teenager would write imagining the complex lives of adults, the other half feels like what an adult would write imagining the complex lives of teenagers. It’s not a bad effort but it’s not a great effort. It’s just okay.
I will say that the art Mia makes sounds amazing. At the end of the book, she leaves an envelope for the Richardsons of the art she’s been working on while she’s been in Shaker Heights and there’s a piece for each of them, a snapshot inside each of their souls. It makes me wonder whether this, like so many other books, could benefit from being shaped and taped, that is cut down a little and made into a movie. Watch this space, I guess.
So in the end it’s another one of those books that I don’t regret but that won’t linger in my memory for long after I close the back cover.
3 stars
*First published on Goodreads 2 December 2019
