From the Bookshelf of EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club…

Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng

Start date: April 1, 2018

Finish date: April 30, 2018

Discussion: MODERN / POPULAR READS

Why we're reading this: Group Pick for Apr '18 - Modern Classic/Popular…more
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MODERN / POPULAR READS

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What Members Thought

Jan 06, 2021 Amber Lea rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: bookclub, fiction

I am struggling to write a review for this.

So this is a book about motherhood. That's the main theme that ties everything in this story together. And it does a lot of that stuff well, but...everything else suffers.

I think the biggest problem is that characters didn't feel real to me. On a surface level I can say I know people like this. I know rebels like Izzy or control freaks like Mrs. Robinson, but none of them felt like actual people. They felt like rough approximations of people with a stra I am struggling to write a review for this.

So this is a book about motherhood. That's the main theme that ties everything in this story together. And it does a lot of that stuff well, but...everything else suffers.

I think the biggest problem is that characters didn't feel real to me. On a surface level I can say I know people like this. I know rebels like Izzy or control freaks like Mrs. Robinson, but none of them felt like actual people. They felt like rough approximations of people with a strange combination of personality traits and oftentimes unexplained motivations. Like for example, why are Izzy's siblings so nasty to her?

It felt like it was written just to tie certain passages together and impart certain messages. So you can pull out parts of this book that are very poignant and well written, but overall it's kind of...I don't even know. Messy in a way that's hard to describe? Even though the plot wraps up neatly...it's not very clean overall.

My second biggest problem is that I was disappointed by the ending because I was more interested in the characters than the plot and it kind of leaves you hanging, because apparently the story centers around Mrs. Robinson so when we're done with her it just ends. I want to know what happened to Pearl.

This book also really wants to impart on you the importance of certain big ideas and it's really heavy handed about it to the point that it's a little irritating.

Another thing that was getting to me was that while there is commentary on things like planned communities, and upper and lower classes, and playing by the rules vs doing what you want, at no point does the author address the way the world works. Like...how do you even comment on any of these things in any meaningful way without acknowledging the big picture? So much of this book seems to be about personal choice/priorities as if the world is whatever individual people make it. Bebe is the only one who had to really deal with being between a rock and a hard place and having literally no choice. Like our choices aren't just driven by our personalities and mindsets. We exist in the world and we're pushed toward certain choices by outside forces. I don't know. This book doesn't feel like it takes place in our universe. Again, it's like a rough approximation of our universe.

Honestly, there's something off about this book that I can't quite describe.

Hating Mrs. Robinson is kind of fun though. ...more

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Aug 10, 2023 Beth rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Elena Richardson “had been brought up to follow rules, to believe that the proper functioning of the world depended upon her compliance, and follow them—and believe—she did. . . . She had, in short, done everything right and she had built a good life, the kind of life she wanted, the kind of life everyone wanted. Now here was this Mia, a completely different kind of woman leading a completely different life, who seemed to make her own rules with no apologies.” This, in a nutshell, is the contras Elena Richardson “had been brought up to follow rules, to believe that the proper functioning of the world depended upon her compliance, and follow them—and believe—she did. . . . She had, in short, done everything right and she had built a good life, the kind of life she wanted, the kind of life everyone wanted. Now here was this Mia, a completely different kind of woman leading a completely different life, who seemed to make her own rules with no apologies.” This, in a nutshell, is the contrast and conflict between the two primary adult characters in Little Fires Everywhere.

I’m a sucker for stories about rule breaking—even though I’m a pretty compliant person myself, truth be told. I love it when Mia asks Elena’s youngest child, Izzy, who is infuriated by unfairness at school, “Well? What are you going to do about it?” And then Izzy does something.

The book has, in fact, many things I enjoy: some ambiguous ethical questions, especially an exploration of the vast complexities surrounding a cross-cultural adoption: “Bebe Chow had been a poor mother; Linda McCullough had been a good one. One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.” Also, the complex mixed feelings of parents for difficult children and/or as their children grow up and grow away from them; Mia’s feelings toward an admired professor: “half the adoration of a schoolgirl for a crush, half the adoration of a devotee for a saint.” Been there.

I feel compelled to compare the book to the miniseries with Reese Witherspoon as Elena Richardson and Kerry Washington as Mia Warren, which I watched about a year before reading the book. The choice to cast the Warrens as Black (and change a couple of plot points accordingly) offered a nice additional angle; both leads are brilliantly cast, which I guess is unsurprising as Witherspoon and Washington are co-executive producers. On the other hand, the series changed the ending in ways that made it seem a bit too obvious and pat: the book and series both begin with a fire that destroys the Richardson house, an obvious arson since an accelerant had started “little fires everywhere,” and both raise the question, answered at the end, of who had set the fires and why. The answer, in each case, comments on the complex relationships among the members of the families, and I suppose the different actions depicted in the series reflect the attitudes that the book conveys in more interior ways. But I prefer the book, which is more complex in its rendering, and also more open ended.

I very much enjoyed reading the book, no doubt in part because my memory of the series was sufficiently hazy and the differences were just great enough that I didn’t know what was going to happen. The characters are clearly delineated, and the conflicts are pointed and effective. I think the young people’s personalities and problems are realistically and effectively rendered, possibly even more so than the adults’. The novel’s Shaker Heights, Ohio, with its combination of rules and idealism, wealth and not-fully-achieved liberal tolerance, offers a good sense of place.

Nevertheless, the whole thing feels a bit slight. It offered me the break I urgently needed after slogging through the turgid complexity of Faulkner’s A Fable, but it was, for me, TOO fast moving and just a bit superficial. I was entertained but not, in the end, exactly impressed.
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