Amazon's Best Novel of 2017
Winner: Ohioana Award • Goodreads Readers' Choice Award 2017, Fiction
Published Worldwide in more than 30 Languages
“Witnessing these two families as they commingle and clash is an utterly engrossing, often heartbreaking, deeply empathetic experience… It’s this vast and complex network of moral affiliations—and the nuanced omniscient voice that Ng employs to navigate it—that make this novel even more ambitious and accomplished than her debut… The magic of this novel lies in its power to implicate all of its characters—and likely many of its readers—in that innocent delusion [of a post-racial America]. Who set the littles fires everywhere? We keep reading to find out, even as we suspect that it could be us with ash on our hands.”
Little Fires Everywhere Sparknotes
— New York Times Book Review
- A t first glance, the novel Little Fires Everywhere seems to be a suburban whodunit. In the opening chapter, a house in a progressive neighborhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio, has burned down after.
- The title is a reference to the little fires that Izzy sets to burn down the Richardson household. It is also symbolic of the multiple 'fires' or problems that occur throughout the novel.
- Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.” And quick, before you go. Like to celebrate? Get on the list!! I love sharing seasonal recipes and ideas for celebrating the holidays.
When Reese Witherspoon first read Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel “Little Fires Everywhere,” she was struck by the very many complex themes around motherhood and womanhood, as well as rac. You could say that this story begins with the ending. Within the first paragraph, we learn that a.
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“Ng has one-upped herself with her tremendous follow-up novel… a finely wrought meditation on the nature of motherhood, the dangers of privilege and a cautionary tale about how even the tiniest of secrets can rip families apart… Ng is a master at pushing us to look at our personal and societal flaws in the face and see them with new eyes… If Little Fires Everywhere doesn’t give you pause and help you think differently about humanity and this country’s current state of affairs, start over from the beginning and read the book again.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
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“Stellar… The plot is tightly structured, full of echoes and convergence, the characters bound together by a growing number of thick, overlapping threads… Ng is a confident, talented writer, and it’s a pleasure to inhabit the lives of her characters and experience the rhythms of Shaker Heights through her clean, observant prose… She toggles between multiple points of view, creating a narrative both broad in scope and fine in detail, all while keeping the story moving at a thriller’s pace.”
Themes In Little Fires Everywhere
—Los Angeles Times
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“Delectable and engrossing… A complex and compulsively readable suburban saga that is deeply invested in mothers and daughters…What Ng has written, in this thoroughly entertaining novel, is a pointed and persuasive social critique, teasing out the myriad forms of privilege and predation that stand between so many people and their achievement of the American dream. But there is a heartening optimism, too. This is a book that believes in the transformative powers of art and genuine kindness — and in the promise of new growth, even after devastation, even after everything has turned to ash.”
—Boston Globe
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“[Ng] widens her aperture to include a deeper, more diverse cast of characters. Though the book’s language is clean and straightforward, almost conversational, Ng has an acute sense of how real people (especially teenagers, the slang-slinging kryptonite of many an aspiring novelist) think and feel and communicate. Shaker Heights may be a place where ‘things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance.’ But the real world is never as far away as it seems, of course. And if the scrim can’t be broken, sometimes you have to burn it down. Grade: A-”