Book Review: Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng's first novel, Everything I Never Told You, blew me away. It would have been hard for Little Fires Everywhere to top it, and it didn't, but it was still enjoyable and thoughtful and impressive in so many ways.

On the Amazon site, the book has been reviewed nearly 2000 times, and the vast majority are four and five stars. Even three star reviews are respectable, in my opinion. What's shocking to me is the 4% of reviewers who felt this book deserved one star. Have they ever read a one star quality book? I have and this isn't it. The one star review should be reserved for books that never should have been published in the first place, not a book you just didn't connect with. Celeste Ng is an amazing writer who couldn't write a one star book if she tried.

Rant over.

I saw Ng at the Tucson Festival of Books this past weekend where she discussed this novel, which is being made into a TV show starring Reese Witherspoon. Having loved her HBO adaptation of Big Little Lies, I'm really looking forward to it.

Little Fires Everywhere is set in the nineties in Shaker Heights - an affluent, planned community that prides itself on its liberalism. The major conflict centers around the abandonment of a Chinese baby and her subsequent adoption by a wealthy, white couple. Ng explores issues of class and race and motherhood in a way that challenges the reader to ask questions without supplying answers.

Book Review: Fates and Furies

It is both shocking and reassuring when I read the reviews on Amazon for a book like this and see that there are actually people with the nerve to leave one star.

Yeah, the nerve.

This may not have been the best book I've ever read (though even those books have been one-starred), but Lauren Groff did not make the National Book Award finalists by accident. Who are these people who one-star a book because they were disappointed by the ending or they didn't fall in love with the main character, or they didn't get the point? They're certainly not writers. There are 201 one-star reviews. It's mind boggling.

The opening of this novel is so beautiful. That first page is what made me take the book home. Usually, I do extensive research before investing my time in a book. For this, I read the opening, closed the book, and set it in the "to buy" stack.

The book is divided into two main sections: the first is Lotto, the second is Mathilde. The reader gets to see their love story from the perspectives of each. The first section drags in places and Lotto comes off as arrogant but deeply loyal. You get the sense that this union has its share of dysfunction, but it's real. Mathilde's section sheds new light on events that seemed somewhat pointless in Lotto's. The second part is much darker and makes you wonder if these people ever really knew one another. The way events are retold from another angle is so well-done.

Criticism that it's pretentious because of its many high-brow literary allusions and it's focus on affluent white people is accurate if those things bother you. But that's what three-star reviews are for.