Little Fires Everywhere: A Powerful Punch Of Peculiar Pregnancies, Pristine Personalities, and Populace Prerogatives
352 pages of perfect magic. This book rocked me and socked me and clocked me and WOO I'm very glad I received it in my lit box subscription a few months ago and FINALLY picked it up. (Get your lit box here, it mofackin' rocks and is one of my fave parts of every month: MyLitBox).
This is a book about two families, ehhhh technically three, who get their world blown up when a new family moves to town. There is Mia and Pearl Warren, a dynamic mother-daughter duo who have traveled the country moving from city to city whenever mother Mia runs out of artistic inspiration, or....is she running from something? There is the Richardson family - an anal-retentive but beloved mother with a busy husband and four kids: Moody, Izzy, Lexie, and Trip. Moody falls in love with Pearl. Pearl falls in love with Trip. Lexie has something crazy happen to her before college apps are due. And Izzy is the black sheep of the family. Then, there is the McCullough's, who are trying to adopt an Asian baby that was abandoned at the local firehouse and after suffering countless miscarriages and false pregnancies.....until trouble comes a knockin and the Warrens and Richardsons, after their families have interlinked in more ways than one, find themselves on opposite sides of the protest lines when a custody battle ensues over a cute lil Chinese baby girl. This book is built upon moral subjectivities, racial benightedness, and the omnipresent voice that Ng gifts us with that allows us to be all-knowing as we dive head first in to the lives of these bigger-than-life characters. She hits on racial tensions, class differences, suburban culture, pregnancy, loss of pregnancy, love, motherhood, following the rules, breaking those rules, the extremity of secrets, and how art and identity intertwine.
The best characters are learned through the profound writing any author provides. It is not upfront. You have to think about the words. You then grasp a picture in your mind of the personality, the insecurities, the dreams... of the characters. Look how the author Celeste Ng tells you exactly who her characters are without saying it exactly:
"She had cried all the way to Lafayette, where they would stay for the next eight months, and even the prancing china palomino she had stolen from the girl's collection gave her no comfort, for though she waited nervously, there was never any complaint about the loss, and what could be less satisfying than stealing from someone so endowed that they never even noticed what you'd taken?"
"When Lexie ordered from a menu, she never said, "Could I have ...?" She said, "I'll have..." confidently, as if she had only to say it to make it so. It unsettled Pearl and it fascinated her."
"You look nice, today," he said, as if he were noticing her for the first time, and Pearl turned a deep pink, right down to the roots of her hair. He seemed embarrassed, too, as if he had just revealed a fondness for a very uncool TV show."
She even does a great job in making you like generally unlikable characters. There are times where I am INFURIATED by Elena Richardson (mom) and Mrs. McCullough, but they have moments where your heart twings with a dash of sympathy.
"Shaker Heights had been founded, if not on Shaker principles, with the same idea of creating utopia. Order - and regulation, the father of order - had been the Shaker's key to harmony. They had regulated everything: the proper time for rising in the morning, the proper color of window curtains, the proper length of a man's hair, the proper way to fold one's hands in prayer (right thumb over left). If they planned every detail, the Shakers had believed, they could create a patch of heaven on earth, a little refuge form the world, and the founders of Shaker Heights had thought the same. In advertisements they depicted Shaker Heights in the clouds, looking down upon the grimy city of Cleveland from a mountaintop at the end of a rainbow's arch. Perfection: that was the goal, and perhaps the Shakers had lived it so strongly it had seeped into the soil itself, feeding those who grew up there with a propensity to overachieve and a deep intolerance for flaws. Even the teens of Shaker Heights - whose main exposure to Shakers was singing "Simple Gifts" in music class - could feel that drive for perfection still in the air."
This is the first true description you get of the town. This is the first time I have read a book where the setting mixes so evenly with the characters of the book. Where the setting is so paramount in the telling of the story. The character development is phenomenal and while the first 80 or so pages could feel as a little dry or slow-paced, all of a sudden, you find yourself completely enthralled by the characters and their extreme contrast with each other and their intense comparabilities with the town they call home. The Richardson's are the definition of Shaker Heights perfect family and when the Warren's come to town, the utopia of Shaker Heights burns to the ground (no, literally, it burns to the ground...well, part of it.) I was intrigued when I found out that Shaky Heights is not a fictional place, but the actual Cleveland suburban hometown of the author Celeste Ng.
I was unimpressed and left disappointed with two things from this book: I feel as though I, the reader, and Izzy, the most underutilized character, didn't get the endings we deserved. I'm hoping in the way that Ng ended the novel, that a second one will be on the way. I want to know if Izzy wants Pearl and Mia. I want to know what happens to her fallout with her family, the Richardsons, after the destruction she caused. I also was not satisfied with Pearl's closure with neither Moody nor Trip. Moody was in love with Pearl and turned into a shitfuck when he realized she was secretly dating his older brother, Trip (who I can only picture looks like Joe Keery from Stranger Things).
And I was waiting for Moody to mature and realize that just because HE was in love with Pearl, didn't mean that Pearl had to be in love with HIM. But it never came, he was an asshole to the very end after I circled so many cute and kind anecdotes from Moody in the first half of the book. Example:
"Pearl's mind, it became clear, was an extraordinary thing, and Moody could not help but admire how fast her brain worked, how effortlessly. It was a pure pleasure, watching her click everything into place. The more time they spent together, the more Moody began to feel he was in two places at once. At any given moment, every moment he could arrange in fact, he was there with Pearl, in the booth at the diner, in the fork of a tree, watching her big eyes drink in everything around them as if she were ferociously thirsty. He would crack dumb jokes and tell stories and dredge up bits of trivia, anything to make her smile. And at the same time, in his mind, he was roaming the city, searching desperately for the next place he could take her, the next wonder of suburban Cleveland he could display, because when he rain out of places to show her, he was sure, she would disappear."
LIKE WHAT A HONEY!!! AND THEN HE WAS RUINED!!!!! It is unfortunate that you can't make someone love you, but if we could, we would all just date robots who give us compliments all the time and constantly perform fellatio on us with expecting nothing in return. Wait, why isn't that a thing? And while I will constantly stand by the idea that just because a man is nice to you, it doesn't mean she has to like you. But Pearl, you really couldn't write at least one word in that nice ass moleskin journal Moody got you? You also a betch.
You learn through the reading that this takes place before cell phones so it was an interesting read because sometimes I truly forget what that world is like! So I was intrigued to see how Trip and Pearl would end or how they would move forward. But again, never got it!! I need to stop pretending as though my novels are going to end in the ways I hope, because as I grow older, I realize life is a lot less like the books I read growing up. The endings are complete. They aren't always happy. They aren't the way the reader wants them to be. But that's life. So even though I'm disappointed, maybe that's how I'm supposed to feel at the end. Damn, I sound emo as hell. Shut me up.
Parts of the writing are so straight to the point, while others are SO descriptive and oddly relate-able:
"It was the soft smells of detergent and cooking and grass that mingled in the entryway, the one corner of the throw rug that flipped up like a cowlick, as if someone had mussed it and forgotten to smooth it out."
I LEGIT HAVE A RUG LIKE THIS. And it pissed me off SO much. My cat attacks it in the middle of the night with his claws and makes the cowlick even fucking worse. But I refuse to throw it out because 1) it cost me $17 2) it cost me $17. You think I throw shit out when it ain't broken? Even when it's broken, I feel guilty throwing stuff away. Look at my Duluth coffee mug I have that I dropped when I burned my tongue with smoldering hot cinnamon sugar coffee and chipped the top curve of the mug. I think I've been accidentally ingesting ceramic clay for the past 7 months but that's better than throwing away a $9 mug that still technically holds liquids!!
Like I said above, you might start this book, and be like "Yooooooo, I could be reading something way more exciting right now," but like, keep reading. You're gonna reach page 186 and be like HOLY SHIT WOAH WOAH WOAH I'M SO GLAD I HAVE REACHED THIS IMPECCABLE MOMENT IN TIME BECAUSE I DID NOT SEE THIS COMING WOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Not exaggerating, I literally wrote "WOAH WOAH WOAH" in the margins and might have peed on my new couch a lil bit.
This book explores what it means to carry the burden of a tragedy in your life, how to move forward, how to open your mind to different perspectives of one moment or one decision and how it's okay to run away sometimes. That it's okay to start over. Like a prairie fire. The earth can be scorched, but soon, everything will start over.
"You'll always be sad about this. But it doesn't mean you made the right choice. It's just something that you have to carry." This line moved me. And moved me again. Until I had tears running down my face and my heart told me that everything is okay and you made all the right decisions to get you to where you are right now. And that we are all holding on. Sometimes by a thick burlap rope. Sometimes by a dwindling thread. Some of us have larger baggage to carry, but it doesn't make us any less worthy. It makes us more human and more accessible to connect with one another. It tells us to share our truth instead of locking it away.
"The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tightly you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all."
I can't give you more on this book before spilling my beans and ruining the whole thing, so now you have to go to the bookstore and buy it. Or buy it here: BUY ME
You will not be disappointed. Please, trust me. This book will start a little fire in your heart :~)
This is a book about two families, ehhhh technically three, who get their world blown up when a new family moves to town. There is Mia and Pearl Warren, a dynamic mother-daughter duo who have traveled the country moving from city to city whenever mother Mia runs out of artistic inspiration, or....is she running from something? There is the Richardson family - an anal-retentive but beloved mother with a busy husband and four kids: Moody, Izzy, Lexie, and Trip. Moody falls in love with Pearl. Pearl falls in love with Trip. Lexie has something crazy happen to her before college apps are due. And Izzy is the black sheep of the family. Then, there is the McCullough's, who are trying to adopt an Asian baby that was abandoned at the local firehouse and after suffering countless miscarriages and false pregnancies.....until trouble comes a knockin and the Warrens and Richardsons, after their families have interlinked in more ways than one, find themselves on opposite sides of the protest lines when a custody battle ensues over a cute lil Chinese baby girl. This book is built upon moral subjectivities, racial benightedness, and the omnipresent voice that Ng gifts us with that allows us to be all-knowing as we dive head first in to the lives of these bigger-than-life characters. She hits on racial tensions, class differences, suburban culture, pregnancy, loss of pregnancy, love, motherhood, following the rules, breaking those rules, the extremity of secrets, and how art and identity intertwine.
The best characters are learned through the profound writing any author provides. It is not upfront. You have to think about the words. You then grasp a picture in your mind of the personality, the insecurities, the dreams... of the characters. Look how the author Celeste Ng tells you exactly who her characters are without saying it exactly:
"She had cried all the way to Lafayette, where they would stay for the next eight months, and even the prancing china palomino she had stolen from the girl's collection gave her no comfort, for though she waited nervously, there was never any complaint about the loss, and what could be less satisfying than stealing from someone so endowed that they never even noticed what you'd taken?"
"When Lexie ordered from a menu, she never said, "Could I have ...?" She said, "I'll have..." confidently, as if she had only to say it to make it so. It unsettled Pearl and it fascinated her."
"You look nice, today," he said, as if he were noticing her for the first time, and Pearl turned a deep pink, right down to the roots of her hair. He seemed embarrassed, too, as if he had just revealed a fondness for a very uncool TV show."
She even does a great job in making you like generally unlikable characters. There are times where I am INFURIATED by Elena Richardson (mom) and Mrs. McCullough, but they have moments where your heart twings with a dash of sympathy.
"Shaker Heights had been founded, if not on Shaker principles, with the same idea of creating utopia. Order - and regulation, the father of order - had been the Shaker's key to harmony. They had regulated everything: the proper time for rising in the morning, the proper color of window curtains, the proper length of a man's hair, the proper way to fold one's hands in prayer (right thumb over left). If they planned every detail, the Shakers had believed, they could create a patch of heaven on earth, a little refuge form the world, and the founders of Shaker Heights had thought the same. In advertisements they depicted Shaker Heights in the clouds, looking down upon the grimy city of Cleveland from a mountaintop at the end of a rainbow's arch. Perfection: that was the goal, and perhaps the Shakers had lived it so strongly it had seeped into the soil itself, feeding those who grew up there with a propensity to overachieve and a deep intolerance for flaws. Even the teens of Shaker Heights - whose main exposure to Shakers was singing "Simple Gifts" in music class - could feel that drive for perfection still in the air."
This is the first true description you get of the town. This is the first time I have read a book where the setting mixes so evenly with the characters of the book. Where the setting is so paramount in the telling of the story. The character development is phenomenal and while the first 80 or so pages could feel as a little dry or slow-paced, all of a sudden, you find yourself completely enthralled by the characters and their extreme contrast with each other and their intense comparabilities with the town they call home. The Richardson's are the definition of Shaker Heights perfect family and when the Warren's come to town, the utopia of Shaker Heights burns to the ground (no, literally, it burns to the ground...well, part of it.) I was intrigued when I found out that Shaky Heights is not a fictional place, but the actual Cleveland suburban hometown of the author Celeste Ng.
I was unimpressed and left disappointed with two things from this book: I feel as though I, the reader, and Izzy, the most underutilized character, didn't get the endings we deserved. I'm hoping in the way that Ng ended the novel, that a second one will be on the way. I want to know if Izzy wants Pearl and Mia. I want to know what happens to her fallout with her family, the Richardsons, after the destruction she caused. I also was not satisfied with Pearl's closure with neither Moody nor Trip. Moody was in love with Pearl and turned into a shitfuck when he realized she was secretly dating his older brother, Trip (who I can only picture looks like Joe Keery from Stranger Things).
And I was waiting for Moody to mature and realize that just because HE was in love with Pearl, didn't mean that Pearl had to be in love with HIM. But it never came, he was an asshole to the very end after I circled so many cute and kind anecdotes from Moody in the first half of the book. Example:
"Pearl's mind, it became clear, was an extraordinary thing, and Moody could not help but admire how fast her brain worked, how effortlessly. It was a pure pleasure, watching her click everything into place. The more time they spent together, the more Moody began to feel he was in two places at once. At any given moment, every moment he could arrange in fact, he was there with Pearl, in the booth at the diner, in the fork of a tree, watching her big eyes drink in everything around them as if she were ferociously thirsty. He would crack dumb jokes and tell stories and dredge up bits of trivia, anything to make her smile. And at the same time, in his mind, he was roaming the city, searching desperately for the next place he could take her, the next wonder of suburban Cleveland he could display, because when he rain out of places to show her, he was sure, she would disappear."
LIKE WHAT A HONEY!!! AND THEN HE WAS RUINED!!!!! It is unfortunate that you can't make someone love you, but if we could, we would all just date robots who give us compliments all the time and constantly perform fellatio on us with expecting nothing in return. Wait, why isn't that a thing? And while I will constantly stand by the idea that just because a man is nice to you, it doesn't mean she has to like you. But Pearl, you really couldn't write at least one word in that nice ass moleskin journal Moody got you? You also a betch.
You learn through the reading that this takes place before cell phones so it was an interesting read because sometimes I truly forget what that world is like! So I was intrigued to see how Trip and Pearl would end or how they would move forward. But again, never got it!! I need to stop pretending as though my novels are going to end in the ways I hope, because as I grow older, I realize life is a lot less like the books I read growing up. The endings are complete. They aren't always happy. They aren't the way the reader wants them to be. But that's life. So even though I'm disappointed, maybe that's how I'm supposed to feel at the end. Damn, I sound emo as hell. Shut me up.
Parts of the writing are so straight to the point, while others are SO descriptive and oddly relate-able:
"It was the soft smells of detergent and cooking and grass that mingled in the entryway, the one corner of the throw rug that flipped up like a cowlick, as if someone had mussed it and forgotten to smooth it out."
I LEGIT HAVE A RUG LIKE THIS. And it pissed me off SO much. My cat attacks it in the middle of the night with his claws and makes the cowlick even fucking worse. But I refuse to throw it out because 1) it cost me $17 2) it cost me $17. You think I throw shit out when it ain't broken? Even when it's broken, I feel guilty throwing stuff away. Look at my Duluth coffee mug I have that I dropped when I burned my tongue with smoldering hot cinnamon sugar coffee and chipped the top curve of the mug. I think I've been accidentally ingesting ceramic clay for the past 7 months but that's better than throwing away a $9 mug that still technically holds liquids!!
Here's my cat Targy in a dragon costume I forced him into for Halloween. Still have the scratch scars all over my hands to prove it!!
Like I said above, you might start this book, and be like "Yooooooo, I could be reading something way more exciting right now," but like, keep reading. You're gonna reach page 186 and be like HOLY SHIT WOAH WOAH WOAH I'M SO GLAD I HAVE REACHED THIS IMPECCABLE MOMENT IN TIME BECAUSE I DID NOT SEE THIS COMING WOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Not exaggerating, I literally wrote "WOAH WOAH WOAH" in the margins and might have peed on my new couch a lil bit.
This book explores what it means to carry the burden of a tragedy in your life, how to move forward, how to open your mind to different perspectives of one moment or one decision and how it's okay to run away sometimes. That it's okay to start over. Like a prairie fire. The earth can be scorched, but soon, everything will start over.
"You'll always be sad about this. But it doesn't mean you made the right choice. It's just something that you have to carry." This line moved me. And moved me again. Until I had tears running down my face and my heart told me that everything is okay and you made all the right decisions to get you to where you are right now. And that we are all holding on. Sometimes by a thick burlap rope. Sometimes by a dwindling thread. Some of us have larger baggage to carry, but it doesn't make us any less worthy. It makes us more human and more accessible to connect with one another. It tells us to share our truth instead of locking it away.
"The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tightly you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all."
I can't give you more on this book before spilling my beans and ruining the whole thing, so now you have to go to the bookstore and buy it. Or buy it here: BUY ME
You will not be disappointed. Please, trust me. This book will start a little fire in your heart :~)
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