Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10
The story and the writing were amazing. I couldn’t put the latter half of the book down. That being said, I thought the characters were a tad shallow. Mia and Pearl were the “underdogs” fighting against white suburbia, with its planned neighborhoods and outward perfection. At the same time, because they stood for nonconformity everywhere, they were obviously the protagonists, with not much room to debate. The Richardsons, save Izzy (and Moody somewhat and Lexie at the end) were all paragons of these “Instagram perfect” families. So the clash between right and wrong here was very clear cut. Pearl is good and stays good for the entire novel. Lexie is charming and stays that way throughout the book; she only gets a bit more empathetic near the end when she learns of Mia’s warmth. I think I would have enjoyed a bit more complexity in the characters. We see glimpses of complexity when Lexie goes to the abortion clinic and uses Pearl’s name, but even that is a predictable action from someone living under Mr. and Mrs. Richardsons’s roof.
For example, when the Richardsons go to a baby shower, Lexie cooing over the baby seemed a bit over the top to me, to the point where I thought there was even some malicious intent. But no, she truly was a bubbly girl who just loved babies. We see glimmers of Izzy’s personality through her bits and pieces of dialogue, and I would have loved to see a lot more of her character developed.
Besides my gripes about the characters, it was a very well-written and well-paced book. I liked the format — introducing the closing scene as the opening scene, and telling the entire story almost entirely through flashbacks and flashbacks inside flashbacks. There were a couple of areas where I felt annoyed at the narrator at revealing a mystery so readily to the reader. When the Mrs. McCullough was talking to Mrs. Richardson about Bebe potentially getting an abortion, she laid out some reasons for her thinking that way. Bebe had gained weight, Bebe had thrown up a couple weeks earlier, this and that. Immediately after, the narrator tells us that Bebe, in fact, had not been pregnant. She had been stressed out at work and had stress eaten, and gained 15 pounds in a month, and that the cause of her throwing up was simply food poisoning. I think this was an area that Ng could have let readers eke out the details of the truth for themselves.
Overall, a great book and a nice uplifting message. 🙂
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