From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng

Start date: May 15, 2018

Finish date: June 1, 2018

Discussion: Reading List

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What Members Thought

Nov 22, 2017 Jane rated it liked it

Shelves: recentfiction, fiction, family-story

It's been a long time since I read this novel. I read it for a book group that several English teachers at my school put together. Another teacher and I, both of us retired, joined them for the book club. It's been wonderful, includes a history teacher and a science teacher who is also a strong feminist. She spent a year reading only women writers.

I always think that what I have read before and what is happening in my life affect my response to a book. I read too much too quickly, and that can b It's been a long time since I read this novel. I read it for a book group that several English teachers at my school put together. Another teacher and I, both of us retired, joined them for the book club. It's been wonderful, includes a history teacher and a science teacher who is also a strong feminist. She spent a year reading only women writers.

I always think that what I have read before and what is happening in my life affect my response to a book. I read too much too quickly, and that can be a problem. Some books don't get their chance. Before Little Fires Everywhere, this book group read Lincoln in the Bardo, and the next book we read was Exit West, both books that experiment with form and realism. I found Lincoln in the Bardo difficult, but learned how to read it by talking about it with these friends and colleagues. "Think of it like poetry," my friend Mary Lynn said.

By contrast, Little Fires Everywhere wasn't challenging and was focused more on plot and character that language or structure. And as many people in this conversation (Constant Reader) have noticed, many of the characters seem like stereotypes. Still...I think that Ng takes on important issues (look at all the ways in which we've been affected by race or social status or wealth (and lack of it) in our own lives. I applaud her willingness to take these issues on. I am in the midst of all of them every day. My son is married to a wonderful, beautiful Jamaican woman and they are about to have a baby. I adore my daughter in law. She is so warm...and also brilliant and beautiful and happy to be a mother. And I know both she and my son worry about their child's future as a mixed race child. So I think the issues that NG raises, though not specifically those issues, are important. I will read what she writes next because she keeps writing and she deals with these issues and by writing, she'll get more nuanced.

I have to say, I cheered when the biological mom "kidnapped" her baby. Not even being open to some kind of shared relationship felt clueless to me, and then it felt perfectly sensible. We have no models of doing anything else.

I agree that the development of adult characters was much less satisfying. And I think Ng is wonderful for taking on such difficult, complicated, important topics. ...more

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Feb 11, 2019 Mary Ellen rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-my-own-challenge

Celeste Ng writes lovely sentences and is so good at describing human interactions and family dynamics. The book raises the seldom-addressed issue of class in American society, the clout that comes from having savings in the bank and the security of a steady job, the unacknowledged assumption that all those good things come just from one's own good planning and hard work, and the self-righteous looking-down-one's-nose at those who - undoubtedly because of poor planning and lack of responsibility ...more

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