The book begins with a house burning down and then goes back to how we got there, following the lives of a group of people who become intertwined through their children and siblings. Mia Warren and her teenager daughter, Pearl, move into a rented house in Shaker Heights, Ohio. It’s a city that has been planned to perfection and run by specific rules, down to what colour you can paint your house. It’s safe and predictable and the opposite of what Mia and Pearl have […]
Better than I gave it credit for
I’ve been trying to suss out how to describe my taste in books and the best I can do so far is to say that I prefer plot-driven to people-driven. You know those books about ordinary folks in small town and the life that unfolds around them? Not my bag, generally speaking. Celeste Ng is really the big exception. I read her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, last year and loved it. So much. A mother and daughter and the life they stumble into in small […]
Little Boxes on the hillside, Little Boxes all the same
I meant to read Everything I Never Told You ages ago but I think I had read too many novels about family secrets and suburbia at the time and kept putting it off for later. I always meant to get around to it, but with the whole Reese Witherspoon book club and optioning of Little Fires Everywhere, I decided to start with Ng’s follow up. The novel, set in 1998, begins in early summer in suburban Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland, Ohio. Ng hints at previous […]
Drama in the suburbs
I read Everything I Never Told You a couple of years ago, and I was surprisingly impressed by the writing and the characters in the novel. So when I saw that Celeste Ng had a new book out, Little Fires Everywhere, and it was on NPR’s Best Books of 2017 List, I immediately put it on my to-read list. The blurb on the book made me think that this book was only about the adoption of a young Chinese baby by a white couple. In reality, the book has […]
“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you.”
This wasn’t very good. Oh, I have to keep going? “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.” Lydia Lee, the prodigal daughter of James & Marilyn, goes missing at the beginning of the book and we quickly discover she has died. James, a Chinese immigrant teacher, and Marilyn, a white former medical student, have thrust a lot of their lost desires on […]
“You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.”
This book is tough. It’s centered around an emotionally devastating premise — the untimely death of a teen girl — and the tension of that mystery unfolding is coupled with a stark examination of gender politics and middle-class family dynamics. It’s the type of story that doesn’t let the reader breathe easily, as it seems too real, and, for many of us, too relate-able in a lot of ways. One minute, you feel deeply for James or Marilyn Lee, struggling with being an outsider and […]