‘Little Fires Everywhere’ is Celeste Ng’s second novel. Her debut novel, ‘Everything I Never Told You’, was a New York Times bestseller and won the Amazon Book of the Year Award in 2014, beating out works by Stephen King and Hilary Mantel. Just like her debut novel, Little Fires Everywhere too begins with a catastrophic event. But here, unlike in Everything I Never Told You, it’s not a death but a raging house fire with the owners contemplating the smoldering ruins of their house in Shaker Height, Ohio, that you are faced with at the beginning of the story. The rest of the book goes back in time and follows the chain of events that led to the tragic end.

 

Book: Little Fires Everywhere

Gere: Fiction

Author: Celeste Ng

Publisher: Penguin Press

Pages: 338, Paperback

 

Set in the 1990s in a seemingly perfect neighborhood in Shaker Heights whose strict rules and protocols make it an ideal community, the story is based on the clash between two families, the Richardson family and their tenant, Mia Warren and her 15-year-old daughter, Pearl. The Richardsons, an upper-middle class family, are living their utopian life when nomadic Mia comes into the picture and Mrs Richardson blames her artistic inclinations for causing disruptions in the community.

 At its core, Little Fires Everywhere is about motherhood, love for a child, and the testy waters of adoption: “To a parent, your child isn’t just a person, your child was a place, a kind of Narnia.” Ng addresses what it means to be a mother and that it isn’t just another role a woman plays in life. Rather, it becomes the most important identity for her from the first time she holds her baby. Through the subplot of a well-off white family adopting a Chinese baby, the issues of race and intercultural respect are also brought to the fore.

What makes the book interesting is Ng’s attention to small details of everyday life. Everything from Pearl’s growing closeness to the Richardson kids and the tension of the custody battle between Mrs Richardson’s friend and Mia’s colleague plays out quite brilliantly. And the narrative is neither too fast nor does it drag on. Ng has crafted her characters so well that you feel like they are people you know personally. You understand the teenage angst Pearl is going through and despise Mrs Richardson for her headstrong ways while Mia’s resilience makes you wonder what it takes to be like her.

All in all, Little Fires Everywhere is a good novel but you never completely warm up to it either. It isn’t a book that will have you pondering life and its intricacies once you are done but, since you will be able to identify with one of the large cast of characters, you will find yourself questioning your morality and wondering what you would have done in similar circumstances.