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kdailyreads's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Infertility, Miscarriage, Racism, Grief, Abortion, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, Abandonment, and Classism
Moderate: Bullying, Sexual content, Xenophobia, Kidnapping, and Car accident
Minor: Cancer, Drug abuse, Rape, Blood, Vomit, Dementia, and Toxic friendship
emtees's review against another edition
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I think I came into this book with my expectations set too high. I’d heard lots of good things about it, and I’d read Our Missing Hearts by the same author earlier in the year and loved it. But Little Fires Everywhere, while it had some good points, just didn’t work for me. I was bored most of the time.
The story is set in Shaker, a real place that was America’s first fully planned town. Everything from the layout of the city to the colors of the houses to how high the grass can grow before you are legally obligated to cut it is set by the town. If this sounds like a nightmare, it might be, but the people of Shaker don’t think so. This is a town that takes its image as a utopia seriously, and that includes believing that it has erased all the social ills that plague the rest of the country, from racism to teen delinquency. Into this perfect town comes a very imperfect mother-daughter duo who shake things up for the residents. That’s the genre we’re working with, one that seems to be very popular among female literary fic writers in particular: small town drama, secrets and lies beneath a flawless surface.
The story centers on two families. Elena is a native of Shaker, and she and her husband have raised four children in the town, striving to meet the Shaker’s ideals to varying degrees of success. Elena is deeply unlikeable in a lot of ways, but she feels very real, sometimes uncomfortably so. She takes the town’s belief in planning and control seriously, and she genuinely believes that it has made her a better person and given her a better life. She is someone who down to her bones believes in following the rules - and when other people don’t, she is sad if they fail but furious if they succeed. This puts her in conflict with her daughter Izzy, a restless, angry teenager who lashes out at injustice and can’t abide hypocrisy. (There are some late-in-the-story attempts to provide explanations for why Izzy and Elena don’t get along that come across as psychobabble; I much preferred their relationship in the beginning, when they were just so fundamentally different they couldn’t understand each other.) In contrast to Elena and her perfect-family-that-isn’t-really there is Mia, an artist and single mother, and her daughter Pearl, who quickly become entwined in the lives of Elena and her children after they rent an apartment from the family. Pearl is enamored of their large home, their family of squabbling siblings, and especially Trip, the handsome, athletic oldest brother. But Elena can’t abide quirky Mia, with her disregard for everything Elena values, and when she begins to look into Mia’s past, Elena uncovers the shocking truth behind Pearl’s birth that has the potential to destroy Mia’s whole life.
So that’s what the book is about. Technically there is also another subplot, involving Mia’s co-worker, a Chinese immigrant named Bebe who, abandoned by her boyfriend in a country where she didn’t speak the language, gave up her infant daughter at a fire station and now, a year later, wants to claim her back from the white family that adopted her. This is potentially a very interesting plot, and it includes some scenes - like one where Bebe’s Chinese-American lawyer interrogates the adoptive mother about what she has done to prepare for raising a child of another race - that are thought provoking. But neither Bebe nor the baby’s adoptive parents are main characters and we don’t have strong reason to be emotionally invested in their stories. Instead, they become ways for the other characters to argue out their feelings on mothers, daughters, race and poverty.
There is also a lot of drama between the teenage characters. I actually liked all of them - in some ways they were more compelling than their parents - but the back and forth of romantic mistakes and jealousies on its own was tedious. There are books that manage to handle adult and teenage drama side-by-side but in this case it didn’t work.
Little Fires Everywhere is a book preoccupied with motherhood, with the relationships between mothers and daughters, with the intense feelings that come from creating a person from your own body. Elena and Mia are different in every possible way - from education to relationship experience to economic status to their underlying philosophies of life - but they are both mothers and the decisions they make are driven by how they feel about that state. Ng views this all with intense feeling but a neutral gaze - Elena is often a bad person but she tries very hard to be a good mother, and while there is no question that Mia will never care about anything as much as she does about Pearl, it is left to the reader to judge whether her choices have made or destroyed Pearl’s life. There is, at times, a sense that the adoptive mothers in the story - whether the woman who took in Bebe’s daughter or, in a flashback, an infertile woman desperate to do anything for a child - are not quite the same thing as biological mothers, that the ties of blood between mother and child (mostly daughters; Ng has less to say about mothers and sons in this book) just matter that much more, and yet we meet daughters who cannot stand their mothers and who dream other women into their places, believing that if they can find the right mother figure their lives will be fixed. It’s a powerful theme that plays out in a lot of different ways, and intertwines nicely with the themes of order and chaos, of following the rules or burning everything to the ground - after all, who in our society is expected to follow as many rules, and punished for breaking them, as a mother? I just wish that Ng could have gotten to those themes without spending so much time on an emotionless subplot and teenage hook ups.
The story is set in Shaker, a real place that was America’s first fully planned town. Everything from the layout of the city to the colors of the houses to how high the grass can grow before you are legally obligated to cut it is set by the town. If this sounds like a nightmare, it might be, but the people of Shaker don’t think so. This is a town that takes its image as a utopia seriously, and that includes believing that it has erased all the social ills that plague the rest of the country, from racism to teen delinquency. Into this perfect town comes a very imperfect mother-daughter duo who shake things up for the residents. That’s the genre we’re working with, one that seems to be very popular among female literary fic writers in particular: small town drama, secrets and lies beneath a flawless surface.
The story centers on two families. Elena is a native of Shaker, and she and her husband have raised four children in the town, striving to meet the Shaker’s ideals to varying degrees of success. Elena is deeply unlikeable in a lot of ways, but she feels very real, sometimes uncomfortably so. She takes the town’s belief in planning and control seriously, and she genuinely believes that it has made her a better person and given her a better life. She is someone who down to her bones believes in following the rules - and when other people don’t, she is sad if they fail but furious if they succeed. This puts her in conflict with her daughter Izzy, a restless, angry teenager who lashes out at injustice and can’t abide hypocrisy. (There are some late-in-the-story attempts to provide explanations for why Izzy and Elena don’t get along that come across as psychobabble; I much preferred their relationship in the beginning, when they were just so fundamentally different they couldn’t understand each other.) In contrast to Elena and her perfect-family-that-isn’t-really there is Mia, an artist and single mother, and her daughter Pearl, who quickly become entwined in the lives of Elena and her children after they rent an apartment from the family. Pearl is enamored of their large home, their family of squabbling siblings, and especially Trip, the handsome, athletic oldest brother. But Elena can’t abide quirky Mia, with her disregard for everything Elena values, and when she begins to look into Mia’s past, Elena uncovers the shocking truth behind Pearl’s birth that has the potential to destroy Mia’s whole life.
So that’s what the book is about. Technically there is also another subplot, involving Mia’s co-worker, a Chinese immigrant named Bebe who, abandoned by her boyfriend in a country where she didn’t speak the language, gave up her infant daughter at a fire station and now, a year later, wants to claim her back from the white family that adopted her. This is potentially a very interesting plot, and it includes some scenes - like one where Bebe’s Chinese-American lawyer interrogates the adoptive mother about what she has done to prepare for raising a child of another race - that are thought provoking. But neither Bebe nor the baby’s adoptive parents are main characters and we don’t have strong reason to be emotionally invested in their stories. Instead, they become ways for the other characters to argue out their feelings on mothers, daughters, race and poverty.
There is also a lot of drama between the teenage characters. I actually liked all of them - in some ways they were more compelling than their parents - but the back and forth of romantic mistakes and jealousies on its own was tedious. There are books that manage to handle adult and teenage drama side-by-side but in this case it didn’t work.
Little Fires Everywhere is a book preoccupied with motherhood, with the relationships between mothers and daughters, with the intense feelings that come from creating a person from your own body. Elena and Mia are different in every possible way - from education to relationship experience to economic status to their underlying philosophies of life - but they are both mothers and the decisions they make are driven by how they feel about that state. Ng views this all with intense feeling but a neutral gaze - Elena is often a bad person but she tries very hard to be a good mother, and while there is no question that Mia will never care about anything as much as she does about Pearl, it is left to the reader to judge whether her choices have made or destroyed Pearl’s life. There is, at times, a sense that the adoptive mothers in the story - whether the woman who took in Bebe’s daughter or, in a flashback, an infertile woman desperate to do anything for a child - are not quite the same thing as biological mothers, that the ties of blood between mother and child (mostly daughters; Ng has less to say about mothers and sons in this book) just matter that much more, and yet we meet daughters who cannot stand their mothers and who dream other women into their places, believing that if they can find the right mother figure their lives will be fixed. It’s a powerful theme that plays out in a lot of different ways, and intertwines nicely with the themes of order and chaos, of following the rules or burning everything to the ground - after all, who in our society is expected to follow as many rules, and punished for breaking them, as a mother? I just wish that Ng could have gotten to those themes without spending so much time on an emotionless subplot and teenage hook ups.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Abandonment
Minor: Drug abuse, Racism, and Abortion