Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky; little boxes on the hillside and they all look just the same.

Shaker Heights is a seemingly perfect community.  The Richardsons are a seemingly perfect family; sure, the youngest daughter, Izzy, is completely odd, but--oh, wait, Izzy burned the house down?  Okay, maybe something is up here after all.

This story focuses around two families: the Richardsons and the Warrens.  The Richardsons, including Mr., Mrs., and children Lexie, Trip, Moody, and Izzy (in descending order for age) have lived in Shaker Heights for Mrs. Richardson's entire life, and those of her children.  Izzy is odd, yes, but the family is basically a perfect picture of upper-middle class America in the late 90s.  The Warrens are a much smaller family, just mother Mia and daughter Pearl.  They've lived a nomadic life driven by Mia's artistic tendencies, but have finally settled in the Richardsons' rental property so that Pearl can have some stability in high school.  Soon Pearl, Lexie, Moody, and Trip are hanging out regularly, and Izzy seeks out Mia, who she feels understands her better than her own family does.  The two families are intertwined, and then abruptly split apart by a custody battle in which neither family is directly involved.

This seems like something of a strange premise for a book, and I was skeptical; how would Ng make this work?  I  liked Everything I Never Told You, but I wasn't amazed by it.  Still, she has a way of writing family life and making it compelling, and that comes through in this book as well.  And while EINTY dealt with suicide (or did it?) this book revolves, deeply and intimately, around issues of motherhood.  What makes a mother?  What makes a good mother?  Is being a blood relative enough?  Or does love matter more?  Or connection to culture?  What matters most here?  And it can't all matter most, and there can't be a balance of it, because that's not a possibility in this particular custody battle, and there are no easy answers surrounding it.  Ng has crafted the ideal scenario for this battle to play out, because everyone is right to some degree, and no one has the right answer--for May Ling/Mirabelle, or for anyone else in the book.

The crafting of the central scenario was well done, though it didn't come into play until fairly late in the book.  Much of the page time is spent building up the characters and the relationships between them so that Ng can later tear them apart, though this is not a tapestry that unravels from all angles; no, there is a central person behind that, and despite having good intentions, she is not very likable.  However, several parts of this book didn't quite work as well as they could have.  First, Izzy was an underutilized character, getting far less page time than the other members of the cast.  I suppose this is because she is supposed to be the person who is sitting back and watching everything, and then acts when no one else is looking.  However, this isn't apparent until much later, and if it had been woven more throughout the book that Izzy knew things that people weren't giving her credit for, there could have been a much better sense of foreboding built up.  Second, the mothers' time lines weren't well woven throughout the rest of the story; they were just dropped in big chunks, and if they'd been broken up a bit and better interspersed with the main timeline, then it would have come across as more even character development instead of info-dumping.

Still, I quite enjoyed this.  I'm not raging that I didn't pick it up from Book of the Month back in 2017, but it was a good book nonetheless and I'm glad I got to it now.

4 stars out of 5.