- Home
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
- Little Fires Everywhere Reviewed By Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com
Little Fires Everywhere Reviewed By Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com
- By Wally Wood
- Published June 22, 2018
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
Wally Wood
Reviewer Wally Wood: Wally is an editor and writer, has published three novels, Getting Oriented:A Novel about Japan, The Girl in the Photo and Death in a Family Business. He obtained his MA in creative writing in 2002 from the City University of New York and has worked with a number of authors as a ghostwriter and collaborator.
With an extensive background in a variety of business subjects, his credits include twenty-one nonfiction books. He spent twenty-five years as a trade magazine reporter and editor and has been a volunteer writing and business teacher in state and federal prisons for more than twenty years. He has finished his fourth novel and has translated a collection of Japanese short stories into English.
Author: CelesteNg
Publisher: Penguin Press
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2429-2
"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."
So begins Celeste
Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (which is how the
firemen discovered the Richardson house when they arrived) .
Ng
herself grew up in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland; it is
almost a character in the novel; and because I set one of my novels
in Shaker Heights, I picked up Ng's novel and got sucked into the
story of Mrs. Richardson (as she is identified almost throughout the
book), and her four children, Trip, Lexie, Isabelle, and Moody. Mr.
Richardson, a corporate lawyer, exists mainly to provide the family's
six-bedroom house, cars for the children who can drive, and other
material goods.
The year before the fire, Mia, a photographer
and single mother, and her daughter Pearl had moved into a duplex
rental that Mrs. Richardson owned. Because Pearl is a student as
Shaker Heights High with the Richardson children, and because Mrs.
Richardson is both Mia's landlady and a generous soul, she hires Mia
to clean her house and the families begin to interact. Among the many
pleasures of Little Fires Everywhere are the scenes
of contemporary high school life in an upper class mid-western suburb
which ring absolutely true to me.
Ng sets up an interesting
dilemma at the heart of the novel. Suppose a pregnant, young, Chinese
immigrant woman is abandoned by her boyfriend. Desperate and without
resources she leaves her newborn at a fire station. The child is
rescued and given into the care of an upper middle-class white couple
who, unable to have a child of their own, have been frantic to adopt.
Almost a year later, the birth mother, now with a job and resources,
wants the child back. The white couple have been waiting for the
adoption to go through and want to keep the infant. Who should have
the baby? Her single mother whose prospects are limited? Or the white
couple who can give the baby all the love, opportunities, and
material goods she could ever want?
There is another dilemma
underlying the novel: Is it better to accept stability and material
comfort than to risk an uncertain/unstable life as an artist? Mrs.
Richardson has made one decision, Mia the other. And each woman's
decision, obviously, affects profoundly the lives and characters of
her children. What makes Little Fires Everywhere so
special is that Mrs. Richardson and Mia have made their decisions
almost without thought—much the way real life works for most of us.
Only when our house is burning down do we realize that actions can
have unexpected consequences.