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.

Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng

Lydia is dead.  But they don't know this yet.

What a beginning.  It sets the tone for this story perfectly: one of a family slowly unraveling in the wake of the favorite daughter's disappearance and, as we readers know is coming, death.  Lydia is the center of the Lee family, a Chinese-American teenager whose life appears to be perfect until, after her death, the cracks begin to appear.  And with those cracks spread the cracks in the other family members' lives.

The bulk of this book is actually set before Lydia's disappearance and death, showing how the Lee family got to where they are.  And in the present of the book--actually set in the 1970s--the family is slowly crumbling in the wake of their unforeseen disaster.  The alternation isn't exactly a new technique, but it really works in this case.

The story itself is really heartbreaking, and struck me for one big reason.  My edition has a cover quote saying, "If we know this story, we haven't seen it yet in American fiction, not until now..."  But we do know this story, don't we?  The story of people wanting to stand out, and to fit in, and of parents putting pressure on their children to live the lives the parents themselves wanted to live, instead of letting the children follow their own dreams.  And of families falling apart under the pressure.  Ng sets this story in the 70s, with a mother who dreamed of being a doctor but gave up on her dream when she began a family and a father whose parents immigrated from China, who has always stood out because of his ethnicity, and wants more than anything to be popular and fit in.  When both parents are unable to achieve their dreams, they focus on their daughter, Lydia, trying to make her into what they'd always dreamed of.  Lydia goes along with it, what she sees as the price for her mother remaining with her.  Meanwhile, her older brother Nath is pushed aside, despite his dreams more closely aligning with his mother's, and Lydia's younger sister Hannah is just forgotten.

I don't think there's anything particularly riveting or revolutionary about the story, the writing, or the structure of the book, but it all comes together to make a lovely whole.  There's enough uncertainty surrounding Lydia's death and Lydia herself to keep us guessing at what, exactly, happened to lead to her death.  And while readers eventually find out the answer to that mystery, there's still a deep sadness surrounding the Lee family, because we know that they will never have the same sense of closure that we do.  I think that's what really makes this book striking--it's just a combo that works, and the ending makes that "working" resonate even more.  The characters are diverse enough that I think there's someone that everyone can empathize with, in one way or another, which also helps to lend this book a sense of deep emotion that books sometimes lack.

4 stars out of 5.