Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Where do we really belong?

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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This is quite a hard book to review.  It’s basically the story of two families.  The Richardson’s are long established in Shaker Heights, both parents work, one a journalist; one a lawyer and they have four children at high school, all close in age.  The perfect American family.   Enter Mia and her daughter, Pearl.  They are itinerant travelers, having lived in 46 places in Pearl’s 15 years.  Mia is an artist, a photographer to be precise, who sells her photographs through a gallery in New York and only selling them when she needs money.  Mia rents a small duplex from […]

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2/15/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:14 |

…sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Just enough time to slip a review in under the wire! This is a book club book for me and I was looking forward to reading it. I liked it, but didn’t love it, which was a surprise given all of the great reviews it received.  It took me a while to read, but really shouldn’t have.  It’s not a long or complicated book.  I’m not sure if that was because I was fitting it in around holiday goings on or if it wasn’t engaging enough to hold my interest for more than a chapter at a time. That being […]

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12/23/2018 's CBR10 Review No:56 |

Book Roundup

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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I have a few books I’ve been putting off reviewing simply because I don’t have much to say about them. That isn’t necessarily because I didn’t like them, I just can’t come up with a lot of words for them. So, I’m going to do a bit of a “at a loss for words round up” and get these in the bank. I’ll put the link to my favorite in the Amazon link box. Little Fires Everywhere (4 Stars) by Celeste Ng Pearl and Maya move into the wealthy, mostly white suburb of Shaker Heights. They’ve been mostly migrant up […]

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12/17/2018 's CBR10 Review No:23 |

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over”

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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The book begins with a house burning down and then goes back to how we got there, following the lives of a group of people who become intertwined through their children and siblings. Mia Warren and her teenager daughter, Pearl, move into a rented house in Shaker Heights, Ohio. It’s a city that has been planned to perfection and run by specific rules, down to what colour you can paint your house. It’s safe and predictable and the opposite of what Mia and Pearl have known for the last few years. Always moving, keeping few possessions and following Mia’s art, […]

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7/31/2018 's CBR10 Review No:26 |

Better than I gave it credit for

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

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I’ve been trying to suss out how to describe my taste in books and the best I can do so far is to say that I prefer plot-driven to people-driven. You know those books about ordinary folks in small town and the life that unfolds around them? Not my bag, generally speaking. Celeste Ng is really the big exception. I read her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, last year and loved it. So much. A mother and daughter and the life they stumble into in small town Ohio sounds like the last thing I want to read but damn if she […]

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6/22/2018 's CBR10 Review No:70 |

Little Boxes on the hillside, Little Boxes all the same

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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I meant to read Everything I Never Told You ages ago but I think I had read too many novels about family secrets and suburbia at the time and kept putting it off for later.  I always meant to get around to it, but with the whole Reese Witherspoon book club and optioning of Little Fires Everywhere, I decided to start with Ng’s follow up. The novel, set in 1998, begins in early summer in suburban Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland, Ohio.  Ng hints at previous neighborhood drama involving interracial adoption, and Mrs. Richardson’s disagreements with her tenants, but the morning […]

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6/14/2018 's CBR10 Review No:109 |

Drama in the suburbs

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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I read Everything I Never Told You a couple of years ago, and I was surprisingly impressed by the writing and the characters in the novel. So when I saw that Celeste Ng had a new book out, Little Fires Everywhere, and it was on NPR’s Best Books of 2017 List, I immediately put it on my to-read list. The blurb on the book made me think that this book was only about the adoption of a young Chinese baby by a white couple. In reality, the book has a lot more going on. It takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a wealthy, planned, […]

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5/10/2018 's CBR10 Review No:22 |

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you.”

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

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This wasn’t very good. Oh, I have to keep going? “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.” Lydia Lee, the prodigal daughter of James & Marilyn, goes missing at the beginning of the book and we quickly discover she has died. James, a Chinese immigrant teacher, and Marilyn, a white former medical student, have thrust a lot of their lost desires on their daughter. James wants her to have friends and fit in while Marilyn, who left […]

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2/8/2018 's CBR10 Review No:18 |


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