Little Fires Everywhere ★★★★★

Brilliantly written, it explores the frustrations yet the deep love mothers have for their daughters. I also love how Ng highlights the different paths that smart women take in their lives in the face of society's judgment and its expectations.

Edition Read

• Edition Type: Kindle
• Number of Pages: 338 pages
• Date First Published: September 12, 2017
• Publisher: Penguin Press
• ISBN10: 0735224293
• ASIN: 0735224293
• Language: English

Description

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours 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 teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just 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 rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends 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 an unexpected and devastating cost . . .

Source: GoodReads

Notable Highlights

It had been a long time since her daughter had let her be so close. Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. [loc. 3360]

Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. [loc. 3517]

It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all. [loc. 3526]

“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.” [loc. 3545]

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. [loc. 3798]