Little Fires Everywhere ★★★★★

Ng writes mothers and daughters better than almost anyone working right now.

This book is built on the gap between how fiercely mothers love their daughters and how badly that love can still go wrong. Ng captures that gap with a line that's stuck with me: to a parent, a child isn't just a person but "a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once." That's the whole emotional architecture of the book in one sentence.

What makes this more than a mother-daughter novel is how Ng uses her cast of women to show different responses to the same pressure: a life built around meeting other people's expectations of what a smart, capable woman should want. Each woman in this book has made a different bargain with that pressure, and none of the bargains are treated as obviously right or wrong. Ng is scrupulous about that. As one character reflects, most of the time there's no clean line between the right way and the wrong way to do something, just "simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right."

The Shaker Heights setting does real work too. It's a place built on the idea of perfection as achievable through enough rules and enough effort, and Ng uses that backdrop to needle at how thin that idea really is. One character notes that rules exist because "if you followed them, you would succeed," and the entire novel is a slow dismantling of that promise.

This is a book about women judging other women, mothers failing daughters while loving them completely, and the cost of trying to live a life that looks right instead of one that feels true. Ng doesn't resolve any of it neatly, which is exactly right. The characters I disagreed with the most were the ones Ng understood the best. That's the mark of real craft.

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]