Little Fires Everywhere
Little Fires Everywhere can keep you up at night. Accidental discovery it was for me to find its audibook.
I started listening and fell in love with the narration. Told in an omnipresent third voice, which switches to close third from time to time, it is an engaging psychological thriller that tells the story of two families. The Richardsons and the Warrens.
The Richardsons have the perfect suburban life while the Warrens live from hand to mouth. The story begins when the latter are offered tenancy by the former, thanks to Mrs. Richardson’s kindness and her desire to do good.
The reader develops sympathy for nearly every character in the novel. There are no real villains. It’s not easy to blame one person and excuse the other. The novelist, Celeste Ng, has done a brilliant job of illustrating how perception matters the most when judging right from wrong and how there might be no absolute right or wrong. It’s all relative.
Those ideas are illustrated through little tales and big events surrounding the lives of the two main families. Another main event is the adoption of a Chinese baby by friends of the Richardsons. That leads to heated racial discussion within Shaker Heights, where this story is based.
You fall in love with the characters. The author has made all characters very well-rounded and very human. Underneath the perfect visible order of Shaker Heights suburbian homes there is disorder, tension, rebellion and drama.
It’s definitely a page-turner of a read (or a non-stop audiobook, if you will). You want to know how the dynamics of the have-nots and haves develop between the Warrens’ (single African-american mother) daughter, Pearl, and the well-off Richardsons’ children.
Through the course of the novel they become absorbed in each other’s lives. There are enough heart-warming events. There are many secrets too, both in the distant past, and the present.
The novel, with its very homey tone, reminded me of The House We Grew Up In, another family-based mystery novel I read a long time ago.
It’s novels like this that make me envy the novelist’ work. It’s a terrific novel. A brilliant piece of fiction.
If fiction is not your thing, watch it in series form (made by Hulu) under the same name.
