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 […]
“You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.”
This book is tough. It’s centered around an emotionally devastating premise — the untimely death of a teen girl — and the tension of that mystery unfolding is coupled with a stark examination of gender politics and middle-class family dynamics. It’s the type of story that doesn’t let the reader breathe easily, as it seems too real, and, for many of us, too relate-able in a lot of ways. One minute, you feel deeply for James or Marilyn Lee, struggling with being an outsider and […]
“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.”
There are a lot of layers involved in Ng’s award winning novel and Little Fires Everywhere employs one of my least favorite tricks- starting in the present with the climatic event before restarting at the true beginning of the story. Mrs. Richardson, a wealthy journalist in the Utopian town of Shaker Heights, wakes up to her house in flames; she was sleeping in after a rough day involving her tenant leaving the apartment she rented and the reader is treated to the events that led to both the […]
Suburban Page Turner
Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere has been on a lot of lists since it was published so I was excited to get my hands on it earlier this week. The novel is about so many things, really, but generally tells the tale of a family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the Richardsons, and how they are each affected in strong and different ways by their tenants, Mia and Pearl Warren. The Warrens are nothing like the Richardsons have ever known in their progressive but rigidly-planned town, […]
Read it before the movie comes out!
I found this one a little predictable, as in, I guessed the “surprises” ending pretty quickly. But that in NO WAY detracted from my enjoyment of the novel, which is full of secrets and twists along the way. The book also raises some pretty interesting questions, especially about adoption and ethnicity. Little Fires Everywhere starts with Izzy Richardson burning down her family’s house, and backs up from there. The Richardsons are a wealthy family living in the planned community of Shaker Heights. Then Mia and […]
What do you do when books have the exact same plot?
So three books came out this year that deal with trans-racial adoption…and somehow they all have the exact same plot. And two have the exact same ending. So that’s annoying. This book is good, mostly. It’s hard to deal with a topical topic and and then have that topic explored in almost exactly the same terms as other books. This book is well-written and the main plotline is interesting and well-handled. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Ann Patchett, domestic-ish, dealing with […]