Little Fires Everywhere

by Celeste Ng

the underlying philosophy being that everything could—and should—be planned out, and that by doing so you could avoid the unseemly, the unpleasant, and the disastrous.

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. He

Pearl was smarter than any of them and yet she seemed comfortable with everything she didn’t know:

she lingered comfortably in the gray spaces.