Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Thoughtfully burning down the house

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Adapted into a limited series by Amazon Prime, Ng’s book follows the intersecting lives of two families in Shaker Heights, Ohio- single mother Mia and her teenage daughter Pearl, and the Richardson family, parents Bill and Elena and their four teenagers Lexi, Trip, Moody and Izzy.  After Mia and Pearl become Elena’s tenants in her rental property, the two families gradually become more involved in each other’s lives- Moody and Pearl become fast friends, Mia agrees to be a part-time housekeeper for the Richardson’s and […]

Celeste Ng, I Stand Corrected

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Confession time: when the lovely Borisanne gifted me with this book in this year’s CBR Book Exchange, I was disappointed. In her defense, it was definitely in my “to read” pile on Goodreads; however, in my defense I forgot it was there. Last year I read Celeste Ng’s “Everything I Never Told You” and I did NOT care for it. I gave it a two. So, I went into reading “Little Fires Everywhere” ready to dislike it but was stunned to discover I really REALLY […]

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 […]

Little Boxes on the hillside, Little Boxes all the same

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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 […]

“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.”

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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 […]

What do you do when books have the exact same plot?

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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 […]



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