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.

The Future of Publishing

Yesterday, I went to the Tucson Book Festival and had the chance to listen to several speakers from the book industry talking about what they know. It was thoroughly depressing.

The agents said writers should be prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars editing and promoting their work. The publishers said self-published books are horrible and that self-publishing is pretty much required in building your platform. The writer/publicist/publisher "team" were proof that if you have a recognizable name and the money to hire someone to help write and promote your story, you can get multiple publishers to make you an offer.

It wasn't so long ago that the way to spot a publishing scam was to find yourself asked to spend your own money. Now, that seems to have changed.

Honestly, this has not been my experience. I've had two books published and they never asked me to kick in a dime. And despite all the industry professionals saying publishers aren't giving advances to new writers anymore, I got one. So as depressing as the day was, I'm not sure all the information was accurate. Maybe they're just trying to discourage us, keeping the slush pile manageable.

Perhaps the most depressing information of the day was the trend that readers have begun to assume that books aren't something you pay for. As writers continue to publish their work for ever-lowering prices, they're perpetuating this idea.