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Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng – review

I n Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America’s first planned communities, order and harmony are prized. The Asian American writer Celeste Ng’s having partially grown up there helps to ground her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere , with a strong sense of place. Set in the 1990s (the decade is deftly pinned when the characters watch Jerry Springer), Shaker Heights is described as the sort of rectitudinous neighbourhood often portrayed in media versions of American suburbs in the 1950s.

Yet in fiction, there’s always trouble in Dodge. Ng begins with the affluent Richardsons, after someone has burned down their house. The three older kids immediately blame the younger girl – the family nut job, who is conspicuously missing. It’s an eye-catching opener, but it might not pay off. The problem isn’t the identity of the culprit, naturally withheld until the very end, but that the crime seems profoundly under‑motivated.

Little Fires Everywhere is less about arson than babies. Ng constructs a three-ring circus, each subplot posing a moral quandary regarding an infant. 1) Close friends of the Richardsons have taken in a baby abandoned at a fire station, whom they hope to adopt. But the little girl’s Chinese mother has got her act together, and wants her daughter back. 2) Years before, the Richardson’s tenant, Mia, carried a child for an affluent but infertile couple, after manually inseminating herself with the man’s sperm. Yet she began to form an attachment to the unborn child. 3) The older Richardson daughter gets pregnant by her unwitting boyfriend. Her family could afford to raise the baby, but a child would interfere with her forthcoming university education.

In each instance, whose rights and desires take precedence?

“It came, over and over, down to this,” Ng spells out, perhaps too explicitly. “What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?”

In case No 3, I wasn’t torn. I’m pro-choice and under-keen on teenage pregnancy, though other readers may feel differently. In the first and second cases, both opposing parties have a legitimate claim on the child, and one party will have to sacrifice for the other’s happiness. Ng deliberately sets poorer biological mothers against prosperous couples who might provide more opportunities, thus asking in whose custody a child is better off.

The trouble was that I didn’t care.

I have struggled with this review. Little Fires Everywhere is well crafted. The characters are vividly drawn. The author manages a large cast, multiple points of view, and all three rings of her circus with grace and authority. The dynamics between siblings and within teenage romances ring true. The prose is supremely competent, and I didn’t mark a single line as weak – although, unusually, I underscored only one sentence in the whole novel (“The silence seemed to stretch itself out like taffy”) as being especially good.

Possibly this childless reviewer has something missing, and is therefore indifferent to stories about babies, with which readers who are parents will deeply engage. Alternatively, the novel itself may have something missing, although I strain to identify exactly what that is. Ironically – is it fire? The interwoven plots do not feel contrived, but they do feel designed. The temperature never seems to rise above 72 degrees fahrenheit. When all was said and done, I wasn’t sure this novel means anything. It has a theme. But does it have a point?

This could be the kind of fiction that many book buyers are looking for. It has all the requisite elements for a satisfying read, since “meaning something” may be elective. It’s likely to be well reviewed elsewhere; Ng’s debut, Everything I Never Told You , won multiple awards. After all, my experience of reading this book was perfectly pleasant. But the world in which I read it would be indistinguishable from the one in which I didn’t. This is a variety of novel that unnerves me, because it’s extremely well done and yet I didn’t warm to it. So what’s my problem? Other lifelong fiction readers may have sometimes been visited by the same unsettling doubt: “There’s nothing wrong with this book. So maybe I just don’t like novels as much as I thought.”

Lionel Shriver’s novella, The Standing Chandelier, is published by the Borough Press in November.

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LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE

by Celeste Ng ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2017

With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in...

This incandescent portrait of suburbia and family, creativity, and consumerism burns bright.

It’s not for nothing that Ng ( Everything I Never Told You , 2014) begins her second novel, about the events leading to the burning of the home of an outwardly perfect-seeming family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, circa 1997, with two epigraphs about the planned community itself—attesting to its ability to provide its residents with “protection forever against…unwelcome change” and “a rather happy life” in Utopia. But unwelcome change is precisely what disrupts the Richardson family’s rather happy life, when Mia, a charismatic, somewhat mysterious artist, and her smart, shy 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, move to town and become tenants in a rental house Mrs. Richardson inherited from her parents. Mia and Pearl live a markedly different life from the Richardsons, an affluent couple and their four high school–age children—making art instead of money (apart from what little they need to get by); rooted in each other rather than a particular place (packing up what fits in their battered VW and moving on when “the bug” hits); and assembling a hodgepodge home from creatively repurposed, scavenged castoffs and love rather than gathering around them the symbols of a successful life in the American suburbs (a big house, a large family, gleaming appliances, chic clothes, many cars). What really sets Mia and Pearl apart and sets in motion the events leading to the “little fires everywhere” that will consume the Richardsons’ secure, stable world, however, is the way they hew to their own rules. In a place like Shaker Heights, a town built on plans and rules, and for a family like the Richardsons, who have structured their lives according to them, disdain for conformity acts as an accelerant, setting fire to the dormant sparks within them. The ultimate effect is cataclysmic. As in Everything I Never Told You , Ng conjures a sense of place and displacement and shows a remarkable ability to see—and reveal—a story from different perspectives. The characters she creates here are wonderfully appealing, and watching their paths connect—like little trails of flame leading inexorably toward one another to create a big inferno—is mesmerizing, casting into new light ideas about creativity and consumerism, parenthood and privilege.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-7352-2429-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Jewell

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Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, book review: Deeply satisfying to read

The author's second novel has already been snapped up by reese witherspoon for a 'big little lies'-style adaptation, article bookmarked.

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Celeste Ng’s second novel Little Fires Everywhere reads not so much as a successor to her first, Everything I Never Told You , and more a companion piece.

Middle-class, Midwest suburban family life is her subject; the teenage girls therein her specialty. Both novels are period pieces – Everything I Never Told You was set in the 1970s, and this time round it’s the 1990s: teenagers lounge around watching Jerry Springer , only a privileged few have pagers, and a cinema trip to see Titanic is the hottest date in town.

But perhaps more significantly, Ng adopts a similar narrative structure in each, beginning with a catastrophic event – in Everything I Never Told You it was the discovery of the body of a 16-year-old girl; here in Little Fires Everywhere it’s a raging house fire – before swiftly travelling back in time in order to start at the beginning, following the chain of events that each led to these tragic conclusions.

Central to the story played out in Little Fires Everywhere is the clash between two families. The Richardsons – whose large picture-perfect house in Cleveland’s progressive Shaker Heights neighbourhood, with its four cars in the copious driveway, is the one going up in smoke when the novel opens – and Mia Warren, a previously nomadic artist, and her 15-year-old daughter Pearl. Mother and daughter are Mrs Richardson’s tenants, but then Pearl strikes up a friendship with the Richardson clan – he’s a lawyer and she’s a reporter, and they have four children: Trip, Lexie, Moody, and Izzy – after which Mrs Richardson, seeing herself as something of a philanthropist, insists that instead of paying rent each month, Mia take on housekeeping duties for the larger family.

Ng is brilliant at observing the small but significant shifts this dynamic entails, complicated further by switched allegiances on either side: Pearl’s increasing closeness to the Richardson kids, along with Izzy – the youngest, who’s regarded by the rest of her family as a troublemaker – finding refuge in laid-back, bohemian Mia’s company. Not to mention the growing tension between the two women as they come down on opposite sides of a custody battle that’s making the local news, Mrs Richardson’s annoyance at what she’s sees as Mia’s “perverse pleasure in flaunting the normal order”.

At its heart, it’s a story about motherhood – surrogacy, abortion, adoption, the trails of a flesh and blood relationship, all versions are considered: “It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?”

“The firemen said there were little fires everywhere,” Lexie tells her brothers as they eye up the charred, steaming shell that is their home in the aftermath of the blaze. “Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident.”

The same could be said of the novel itself. Ng paces her narrative like a pro, consummately entwining multiple threads until each and every character is implicated in the denouement. Deeply satisfying to read, Reese Witherspoon has also already lined it up for a Big Little Lies -style adaptation.

'Little Fires Everywhere' by Celeste Ng is published by Little Brown, £16.99

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Author Interviews

A mother and daughter upset suburban status quo in 'little fires everywhere'.

Scott Simon

Little Fires Everywhere

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Celeste Ng's new novel is about two families in the heart of America who can't seem to see into each other's hearts. The Richardsons are a happy family with four children. "The soft smells of detergent and cooking and grass mingle in the entryway" of their lovely Ohio home, Ng writes.

Then, Mia Warren and her teenage daughter, Pearl, pull up with everything they own in their Volkswagen Rabbit, and rent the Richardsons' guest house. The two families become enmeshed in each other's lives in all ways. The result is Little Fires Everywhere.

Ng herself is from Shaker Heights, Ohio. "Writing about my hometown is a little bit like writing about a relative," she says. "You see all of the great things about them, you love them dearly, and yet you also know all of their quirks and their foibles."

Ng says the Shaker Heights community is its own character in the book, and like any character, "it's got its strengths, and it's got its weaknesses."

Interview Highlights

On the community of Shaker Heights

It's a suburb on the east of Cleveland and it's known for being very progressive, very affluent, and very racially diverse, which is actually the reason my parents chose to move there. Every house has a front lawn. The architecture is sort of carefully designed. And the whole community was sort of planned to be — almost a utopia.

On planning to be an integrated community

It was very deliberate. In the '50s I think there was an incident where someone had started an explosion at the house of black professional. And the community really at that point came together and decided that they wanted to try to actively integrate the community. That's an attitude that's continued up to the late '90s — and to now.

Celeste Ng is also the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You. Kevin Day Photography/Penguin Press hide caption

Celeste Ng is also the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You.

On how two families become intertwined because of their children

There are the parents that you're born to, and then there are the parents that you choose, and they're not always the same people. And so, in the novel, the Richardson children are drawn to Mia Warren because she's so different from their mother. She's a little bit of a free spirit — she's a free thinker, she's an artist. And likewise, Mia's daughter Pearl is drawn to Mrs. Richardson who's a pillar of the community. She's very grounded, she's a rule follower. In some ways, they're seeking out things that they don't get from their own mothers.

On Mia, who had previously always been on the move, finding herself sucked in to Shaker Heights

Mia's guiding principle as she's been moving around so much has always been: don't get involved and don't get attached. What happens in this case is she meets someone in Shaker Heights. ...

[She's] a Chinese-American woman, she's an immigrant, she's not very well off, she's a single mother. She feels she's unable to care for her baby and she leaves her baby at a fire house and she's basically given up all her rights to her child. ...

When Mia meets her, this woman has kind of gotten her life together and she kind of wants to get her child back, and, of course, that causes some complications.

On issues of race and class in adoption

One of the reasons that this adoption becomes so contentious is that the baby is a Chinese-American baby and the family that adopts her is a white couple. And this raises all sorts of questions about race — can a white couple raise an Asian-American baby properly? Is she going to be missing out on something? It also raises questions of class — you know, this working-class mother versus this very affluent professional couple in Shaker Heights. And so it touches on a lot of the things that Shaker Heights wants to handle perfectly, and of course it doesn't.

On whether she's hard on the adoptive couple in the book

I tried very hard in writing the book to show that this is a complicated situation. I think that right now our sort of natural sympathies are often with the biological mother. We tend to prioritize that — in not all cases, but in many cases.

Even as little as about 20 years ago, often our sympathies ran in the other direction. There was a case in the early '90s known as Baby Jessica where a baby was adopted and then the birth parents wanted her back and public sympathy at that time was almost completely with the well-off adoptive parents. So I think it does say something about our position — where we are as a society — who we tend to favor.

Code Switch

'everything i never told you' exposed in biracial family's loss.

On whether she intended for readers to identify more with free-spirited Mia Warren than rule-following Mrs. Richardson

That's part of our national spirit. We tend to favor people who go out on their own, who strike out and defy convention. We're not a culture ... that celebrates conformity, or rule-following, or that kind of sacrifice — and there are cultures that are like that.

I think, though, that many of us have a little bit of Mrs. Richardson inside us — I know that I do. And one of the parts of the book that I hope will spark some conversation is sort of looking carefully at ourselves and recognizing the ways in which we might be conformist, or we might be rigidly holding onto things that we need to be flexible about.

Ian Stewart and Barrie Hardymon produced and edited the audio of this interview. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.

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Little Fires Everywhere brilliantly traces the fault lines of race and class beneath a small town: EW review

The city of Shaker Heights, Ohio, has its own official motto: "Most communities just happen; the best are planned." Some things are mandated by law: where trash cans belong (in the backyard, never on the curb), which house-paint colors are approved (Tudors must be a specified cream; English-style homes can go a little wilder, as long as they stick to "slate blue, moss green, or a certain shade of tan"). But it's the unspoken rules that prove a trickier learning curve for Mia Warren and her 15-year-old daughter, Pearl. A freewheeling bohemian whose thumb rings and messy topknot mark her an outsider as clearly as her single motherhood, Mia creates the kind of art that sells, at least sporadically, in New York galleries, even if it doesn't make much sense to her new landlady, pedigreed Shaker Heights native Elena Richardson. Elena also doesn't understand what her own lovely, privileged children see in the oddly self-confident Pearl — or why Mia seems to be taking sides against her dear friends the Wrights in their fierce custody battle for a Chinese baby girl found abandoned at the local fire station.

Little Fires echoes several themes from Ng's lauded 2014 best-seller, Everything I Never Told You , tracing the fault lines of race, class, and secrecy that run beneath a small Midwestern town. And again, calamity shatters a placid surface on the first page (that title is more than a metaphor). But here, she moves the action up from 1977 to the Clinton-era '90s and widens her aperture to include a deeper, more diverse cast of characters. Though the book's language is clean and straightforward, almost conversational, Ng has an acute sense of how real people (especially teenagers, the slang-slinging kryptonite of many an aspiring novelist) think and feel and communicate. Shaker Heights may be a place where "things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance." But the real world is never as far away as it seems, of course. And if the scrim can't be broken, sometimes you have to burn it down. A-

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Little Fires Everywhere

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• Sep 12, 2017, 352 pages
• May 2019, 368 pages

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About This Book

Book summary.

Winner of the 2017 BookBrowse Fiction Award From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You , a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town - and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides.  Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs. Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

Excerpt Little Fires Everywhere

The orchestra teacher, Mrs. Peters, was widely disliked by everyone. She was a tall, painfully thin woman with hair dyed an unnatural flaxen and cropped in a manner reminiscent of Dorothy Hamill. According to Izzy, she was useless as a conductor and everyone knew to just watch Kerri Schulman, the first-chair violin, for the tempo. A persistent rumor—after some years, calcified as fact—insisted that Mrs. Peters had a drinking problem. Izzy hadn't entirely believed it, until Mrs. Peters had borrowed her violin one morning to demonstrate a bowing; when she'd handed it back, the chin rest damp with sweat, it had smelled unmistakably of whiskey. When she brought her big camping thermos of coffee, people said, you knew Mrs. Peters had been on a bender the night before. Moreover, she was often bitingly sarcastic, especially to the second violins, especially the ones who—as one of the cellos put it drily—were "pigmentally blessed." ...

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All the characters feel lifelike and balanced – everyone has their own strengths and flaws, and you sympathize even with the antagonists. Some of the story's plot does seem derivative. Even if this is not a novel for teens, the sections that feature Pearl and the Richardson children include many familiar tropes of young adult dramas – unrequited and requited love, teenage angst, the value and tensions of friendships, loners contrasted against the popular folk. Still, with its expertly done characterization, beautiful and often poignant writing, and subtle examination of suburban America, Little Fires Everywhere fills the reader with emotions and questions that linger long after the last page is finished... continued

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(Reviewed by Erin Szczechowski ).

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Girls in Trouble by Caroline Leavitt Set in 1987, this novel centers around an "open" adoption. After Sara's lover Danny learns she is pregnant, he splits...

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Little Fires Everywhere

By celeste ng, arson, adoption and class divisions ignite tensions in a well-to-do town in ohio.

Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere has been high on my to-read list for a while, since its release back in the Fall of 2017. It’s gotten very good reviews, and it’s in development as a Hulu series (produced by Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington).

I held off on reading it because I had lukewarm feelings about her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You , but I had a chance to read it this weekend and was pleasantly surprised.

Plot Summary

For the Detailed Plot Summary, click here or scroll all the way down .

The book opens with a fire in the well-heeled neighborhood of Shaker Heights — a culmination of simmering tensions in the community.

The town has been divided over a thorny issue involving the adoption of a baby by a couple in the neighborhood. While the couple is well-off with good intentions, the birth mother has been searching for her baby since she left her at fire station in desperation and then subsequently realized her mistake a few days later.

In story about adoption, motherhood, race and social divisions, Celeste Ng presents a thoughtful and gripping drama about community wrestling with difficult questions about character, class and values.

Book Review

I read Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You , a little over a year ago, and had generally positive but fairly lukewarm feelings about it. In Little Fires Everywhere , Ng presents a more confident, compelling story while maintaining the positive aspects – solid writing, empathetically written characters, etc – of her first novel.

Here, Ng draws detailed portraits of a neighborhood, family and friends divided by thorny issues relating to the adoption of a baby. The Richardsons are well-off with a cadre of promising teenage kids, and Mrs. Richardson is close friends with the couple that has adopted the baby in question. Meanwhile, the Warrens are a modest family of two — a single mom and her daughter — who are minorities and less financially stable. Mia Warren is the one who tells the birth mother about the baby’s whereabouts.

I really liked that Ng fleshes out each character in her story, and each one of them feels like an individual. There are no easy answers in this book filled with good intentions and imperfect people caught in an impossible situation. In the process of giving each character a full background, there’s a few parts that drag a little, but it’s a pretty minor issue.

Throughout the story, a range of characters with differing backgrounds, values and mindsets attempt to make sense of the situation, coming to vastly different conclusions. Ng treats each of these viewpoints with respect and diligently attempts to present the best arguments on each side. She handles tricky topics with deftness, discussing things like the inherent difficulty of reconciling the desire for social justice against the desire for social order. Adoption, abortion and even surrogacy all crop up in this book, and Ng handles each with care and measured consideration.

It’s a thoughtful and insightful book, presented through the lens of a neighborhood drama that gives the story its beating heart and provides the book with the action and intrigue to drive the plot forward.

Little Fires Everywhere Movie / Series Adaptation

There’s also a promising adaptation of this book in the works. The Little Fires Everywhere adaptation is planned as an 8-episode Hulu mini-series, slated for 2020. Reportedly, there was a huge bidding war before Hulu won the rights to the series. Reese Witherspoon (as Elena Richardson), Kerry Washington (as Mia Warren) and Rosemary DeWitt (as Linda McCullough) are included on the cast list.

For all the details, see Everything We Know about the Little Fires Everywhere Hulu Limited Series .

Reese Witherspoon as Elena Richardson and Kerry Washington as Mia Warren

Read it or Skip it?

Little Fires Everywhere is one of those books that’s easy to recommend, but is best read if you’re in a thoughtful mood. It’s well written, accessible and poses intriguing questions about complex issues. There’s a lot of stuff to mull over in its brisk 300 or so pages. This has been a popular book club pick ever since its release back in 2017, for good reason.

This is more of a considered, issues-focused book than a plot-heavy thriller or anything like that, so I’d recommend taking that into consideration and deciding if that’s something you’re interested in.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, which I found very engaging. It’s a story that’s well worth a few hours of your time. I’m very interested to see what she comes up with next!

Have you read this or are you thinking about it? Feel free to share your thoughts below! See it on Amazon .

Detailed Book Summary (Spoilers)

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15 comments

Share your thoughts cancel reply.

I really ejoyed this one too. Did you see my review? Sorry, I don’t remember.

hmm not sure, I read a bunch of reviews about this book, but I’ll be sure to check it out!

I will have to get to this one. Thanks for a thoughtful review .

thanks for reading, rosi!

Great review! This sounds like the kind of novel I’d enjoy, and I’ll have to bump it up on my list.

Thank you! Hope you like it if you get a chance to read it!

Heard lots of good things about this, I must read it :)

Thanks for dropping by! Hope you like it if you get a chance to read it! :)

Thank you :)

this sounds interesting, nice review

I bought a copy of this book yesterday because everybody raves about it. I hope I like it as much as you did.

Hope you enjoy it if you end up reading it! Thanks for dropping by!

Great review! This book has been sitting on my shelf for way too long but I hope to tackle it this month for the Asian Readathon. This’ll be my first read by her.

Thank you! And yes this would totally be the perfect book for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage month, what a great idea!

Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng is a slow-burn read (pun intended) told from multiple point of views. It seems people either love this novel or don’t care for it. I compare it to when watching a movie where one expects more action to happen. Sometimes the slow pace is not for everyone. But I encourage you to give this read a try because it’s an impactful story about class, privilege and race.

 Earlier this year, it was announced that Little Fires Everywhere  will be developed as a limited series for Hulu. This novel definitely lends itself to a series format and I’m curious how it will all play out in the series. And of course, what changes they make. I hope they have Ng working on the TV scripts as she is a very talented writer.

Updated: So all the Little Fires Everywhere episodes are now up on Hulu. And wow, they made quite a lot of changes! My book club questions for Little Fires Everywhere take a closer look at the differences between the book and TV series.

Story structure

The book starts off in the present where the Richardson house is on fire. We quickly meet the members of the family: Mrs. Richardson/Elena, Mr. Richardson/Bill, Moody, Trip and Lexie. We don’t meet the youngest daughter Izzy because apparently she started the fire and fled. There’s also two major characters outside of the family—Mia (mother) and Pearl (daughter)—who were tenants at the Richardson’s rent house but have now left town. The Richardson family is very wealthy, while Mia and Pearl are barely scrapping by. So from the first chapter, we know there’s a big finale to come. We then switch to the past events that lead up to the fire.

As you can see there are many different characters, even more that I didn’t list, but it isn’t hard to follow. It’s truly impressive how Ng can weave several different perspectives—and scenes— all on the same page. Each character’s voice is distinct and believable. Conversations flow well and easily.

Little Fires Everywhere takes place in Shaker Heights, a progressive suburb of Cleveland. Ng, herself, is from Shaker Heights so that brings an extra layer of intrigue to the story. Shaker Heights sounds like so many communities in the U.S.—a strive for perfection and order—although perhaps on steroids. There’s lots of rules and regulations and plenty of attention on appearances. The setting defines this book as Elena is very consumed with order and rules, making her the perfect resident to Shaker Heights. Whereas Mia is on the opposite end of the spectrum and lives a disorderly but free life.

The book takes place in the ’90s right when the Clinton scandal happened. Ng says that she chose that time period because she would have been around the same age as the Richardson kids in the book. Another added component to this setting is, of course, nostalgia but also how much impact the Internet has. There’s quite a bit of mystery happening in the novel around who Mia is and where she came from that probably could have been solved much quicker with the aid of the Internet. But it’s the ’90s, so the library, phone and in-person discussions are all used.

A major theme is examining the dynamic of different classes. While the Richardson’s might not be quite one percenters, they’re still rich and present themselves as progressive. Elena believes it’s her duty to help out the “less fortunate” like Mia. Elena’s daughter Lexie adopts the same mindset when it comes to Mia’s daughter Pearl. But they’re still blind to their own privilege. Despite the belief that someone like Mia is less fortunate because she doesn’t have much money, the reality is that Mia is driven by her art. She doesn’t care about order, appearances or wealth. And that leads to some interesting interactions between Elena and Mia. Another storyline is when Pearl becomes enamored with the Richardsons and their lifestyle while Izzy believes she finds a kindred spirit with Mia.

Race is another big topic of this novel. In fact, a significant storyline that doesn’t directly involve Elena and Mia, at least at the start, is when friends of the Richardson’s attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby and a custody battle erupts. The baby’s mother left her at a fire station but it becomes apparent that the mom suffered from postpartum depression. The mother recovered and wants her daughter back but the family had already begun the adoption process. This puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides but it also springs open the dialogue of race. Lexie proudly proclaimed the the city doesn’t see ‘race’ but it’s more complicated than that, again showing Lexie’s blind spot. A big discussion is whether the baby will still be connected to her birth culture if she remains with the white American couple.

There’s plenty to digest with Little Fires Everywhere .

It’s a slow-burn but definitely worth the wait.

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Little Fires Everywhere

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Reviews of the Novel

• On Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng Book review written by Abigail G. H. Manzella for the Kenyon Review.
• Illuminating America: Celeste Ng In Publisher's Weekly, Elyssa East writes a reflection on the novel and Celete Ng's reception as a Chinese-American author.
• In a Quiet Ohio Town, Who Started the Fire, and Why? Author Eleanor Henderson reviews the novel in the NYTimes. See more for information on accessing your NYTimes account through the library. more... less... To create your account on the NYTimes.com: 1, Go to the account access page (before the page appears you may be prompted to login to Knox--do that using your Knox email credentials). Note: If you are using Chrome, you may see a page saying "Did you mean nytimes.com?" \ 2. Click on the "Ignore" button to head to the sign in page. If you do not have an account on the NY Times site, click on the button to create one. Otherwise, click on the link to login to your account. 3. Enter your Knox email address, then click continue and enter your Knox Password 4. Select your graduation year, and start your access.

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Celeste Ng is back with a dark parable of America’s history of child removal

The author of Little Fires Everywhere’s new book, Our Missing Hearts, brings Cold War dystopia into the present.

by Constance Grady

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Our Missing Hearts , the new novel from Little Fires Everywhere author Celeste Ng, takes place in a retro sort of dystopia, a Cold War kid’s nightmare. It’s the kind of world where people spend a lot of time worrying over un-American values and threats to the American way of life , where kids are taught to inform on their neighbors, and everyone still rides their bike to school.

But the America of Our Missing Hearts isn’t fretting over secret Russian communists. In the process of recovering from a vaguely detailed economic meltdown that’s become known simply as “the Crisis,” America has turned on China, and on every “Person of Asian Origin” who might either come from China or be mistaken as having done so.

The resulting society, as all successful dystopias do, bears an unsettling resemblance to our own, retro vocabulary be damned. In Ng’s world, Asian Americans are harassed and attacked in the streets . Books are banned from schools and libraries , then pulped and turned into toilet paper. Most urgently, children are taken away from any parent who’s been reported as holding un-American ideas, placed with foster families in faraway cities, and given new names so they never find their way back to their old homes.

Bird, the 12-year-old boy at the center of Our Missing Hearts , has not been taken away from his family. Instead, his mother, Margaret, has vanished. An Asian American poet whose famous line our missing hearts has become a slogan of the protest movement, Margaret disappeared three years before the beginning of the novel. Bird has been left with his terrified single father and a thousand questions. As the novel begins, Bird is in the process of making up his mind to look for Margaret.

Bird’s quest powers Our Missing Hearts forward through the first and strongest of its three sections, as he makes his way through secret library networks, hunting down missing books laced with clues. There is something both sweetly old-fashioned and subtly horrific about Bird’s fairy tale-inflected search for his missing mother, his slowly dawning realization that the world in which he lives is deeply flawed. It reads like a classic kid’s book you half-recall picking up in the fifth grade. It’s giving The Giver .

Once we leave Bird’s narration and move into Margaret’s more adult voice, however, Our Missing Hearts begins to falter. Margaret is amorphous, less a real character than a political cipher who exists to draw emphatic underlines below all Ng’s real-world parallels.

When Margaret first becomes outraged over her country’s child removals, Ng has her begin to learn “things she’d been able to not know, until now,” about the brutal historical removals of Indigenous children and migrant children and foster children — as though Ng doesn’t trust her readers to recognize those parallels on our own. When Margaret encounters the Black parents of a woman killed at a political protest holding a sign with Margaret’s poem on it, she spends pages thinking about the troubled political relationship between Black and Asian American communities. The eventual understanding she reaches with the parents in question becomes “a small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.” Whenever Margaret is talking, this book has a tendency to swing from interestingly polemic to disastrously didactic.

In contrast, Ng’s writing about parenthood is tender, lucid, and unsentimental. One parent telling a story about their lost child can’t remember if the story took place when she was 5 or when she was 15, because of “how slippery and elastic time was in the fact of your child, how it seemed to move not in a line but in endless loops, circling back again and again, overwriting itself.” Margaret teaches Bird “to pluck honeysuckle blossoms from the vine and touch the end to his tongue: such sticky sweetness.” In her love for Bird, Margaret resolves at last into a real person: in the specificity of it, the sensuality.

Ng had her breakout hit with 2017’s Little Fires Everywhere , a beautifully observed novel of suburban motherhood that was adapted into a Hulu series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington . Our Missing Hearts is a weaker outing than its predecessor, clumsier and less grounded in character, too ham-fisted in the political points it’s determined to make. Still, it shines in Ng’s language, and in the dark fairy tale she conjures forth.

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Review: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Ignites Over Race and Class

Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington play moms divided by nearly everything in the Hulu mini-series.

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By Mike Hale

The Hulu mini-series “Little Fires Everywhere” is set in the 1990s, a fact that its script and soundtrack take great pains to remind you of: Sugar Ray and Grey Poupon, “Waterfalls” and “Before Sunrise.” There’s even a reasonable onscreen facsimile of the New York Times lobby circa 1997.

Watching it, though — three of its eight episodes appear Wednesday, followed by one each week — you’ll most likely be reminded of a more recent vocabulary. You can almost sense the characters catching themselves just before they refer to one another’s appropriations, microaggressions and code switching. Rarely has a period piece felt this assiduously up-to-date in its racial and gender politics.

Based on Celeste Ng’s best-selling 2017 novel, “Little Fires Everywhere” originated with Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine. And like another Hello Sunshine project, HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” it adapts a literary page-turner by a female author into a starring vehicle for Witherspoon.

More pertinently, it also resembles “Big Little Lies” in the way it evokes the tradition of the Hollywood — you’ll excuse the term — “women’s picture,” movies mostly made by men (Douglas Sirk, George Cukor, William Wyler) that accommodated female stars and domestic situations by wrapping them in sometimes high-pitched melodrama.

And while “Little Fires,” developed by Liz Tigelaar (“Brothers and Sisters,” “Casual”), is staged and edited at a calm, even deliberate, pace, with a variety of melancholy cover versions of peppier ’90s songs, there’s no way to get around the melodramatic core of the material. (Seven episodes were available for review.)

Witherspoon plays Elena Richardson, mother of four and lawyer’s wife in the ur-suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. She also works part-time at the local newspaper — her dreams of a big-city career were scuttled by motherhood — and manages a family rental property, which is how she meets Mia Warren (Kerry Washington), an art photographer, and Mia’s teenage daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood).

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Little Fires Everywhere – Celeste Ng

Soon to be a Hulu limited series, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington

eBook includes special materials for book clubs: a Q&A with Celeste Ng and John Green, a letter from Celeste Ng, and book club discussion questions.

Named a Best Book of the Year by: People, The Washington Post, Bustle, Esquire, Southern Living, The Daily Beast, GQ, Entertainment Weekly,  NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Audible, Goodreads, Library Reads, Book of the Month,  Paste ,  Kirkus Reviews ,  St. Louis Post-Dispatch,  and many more !

From the bestselling author of  Everything I Never Told You , a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese -American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town–and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides.  Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.

Little Fires Everywhere  explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

Highly recommended by Artisan Book Reviews

Purchase Little Fires Everywhere by best selling author Celeste Ng @Amazon Here

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