Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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 alluring 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 the Richardsons' friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family – and Mia's.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of long-held secrets and the ferocious pull of motherhood-and the danger of believing that planning and following the rules can avert disaster, or heartbreak.

Audible Audio

Published September 12th 2017 by Penguin Audio

Genre: Fiction
Narrator: Jennifer Lim

 

Kristine's Thoughts:

I have just recently introduced audiobooks into my life and Little Fires Everywhere was only the third one I've listened to so far. Am I ever glad that I decided to listen to this book. I chose it because it was the Goodreads 2017 winning title in the fiction catagory and I previously read Everything I Never Told You and loved it.

I am not going to re-tell this story because I can't and I won't. This book/audiobook can't be explained properly in a few short paragraphs and I truly feel it would be best enjoyed without too much forward knowledge.

This audiobook was very character driven with so much detailed character development that it would have been impossible to not feel and empathise with each and every one of them. There were so many different little stories (as the title suggests) that weaved and entangled together from different point of view that somehow when thrown together created the bigger story. Just when I was thinking I couldn't enjoy one of the characters more another would capture me just as much. I was truly surprised at how much I got lost in it and how much I could empathise with so many different sides of the same conflict. Celeste Ng did a fantastic job of fleshing out each character and conflict so that you could truly feel all sides of the story.

This book showcased how things are not always as they seem and what looks perfect on the outside isn't always so. It showed the many different faces of love and family and how the choices people make can impact the lives of many others. It was truly a fantastic story that is going to stick with me for a very long time. I loved every minute of it!

About the Author

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the ALA’s Alex Award, and the Medici Book Club Prize, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Celeste attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.

Currently, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, will be published by Penguin Press in fall 2017.

Connect with Celeste

Website/Twitter/Goodreads