Behind the picket fences
- Book: Little Fires Everywhere
- Location: Cleveland
- Author: Celeste Ng
Set in the pristine, structured community of Shaker Heights, a progressive suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere is a beautifully told modern morality tale.
The Richardsons have it all. Matriarch Elena and her lawyer husband live in the perfect house with a perfectly manicured lawn and adhere to all the rules. Three of their children – Trip, Lexie and Moody – are all different, but seem destined to conform. And then there’s Izzy….
But the hidden cracks in their outwardly ordered lives begin to show when free-spirited photographer Mia Warren and her teenage daughter Pearl arrive in Shaker Heights.
The families’ lives intermingle. Pearl spends most of her time at the Richardsons’ house, embracing the feeling of permanence after an itinerant life.
‘At the Richardson house were overstuffed sofas so deep you could sink into them as if into a bubble bath. Credenzas. Heavy sleigh beds. Once you owned an enormous chair like this, Pearl thought, you would simply have to stay put. You would have to plant roots and make the place that held this chair your home.’
Izzy latches on to Mia’s creativity and sensitivity, so different from her own family’s sterile predictability.
The fuse is lit when the McCulloughs, close friends of the Richardsons, try to adopt an abandoned Chinese-American baby. A custody battle ensues, dividing the community and setting Elena on a dangerous path, trying to uncover Mia’s own mysterious past.
The author manages to explore the challenging themes of motherhood, adolescence, race, class and secrecy at the same time as drawing vivid characters and weaving multiple plot strands.
Little Fires Everywhere is a forensic analysis of picket-fenced suburban America. And the author knows Shaker Heights well….she lived there.
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