Little Fires Everywhere
A town designed to be perfect. A woman designed to disrupt it. Ng pulls the thread and the whole fabric comes undone beautifully.
Shaker Heights
Celeste Ng's 2017 novel is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the perfectly planned progressive suburb, where the Richardson family's orderly life is disrupted by the arrival of Mia Warren, an itinerant artist, and her teenage daughter Pearl. When a custody dispute over a Chinese-American baby divides the community, the two families must confront everything they have avoided about race, class, privilege, and what it means to be a mother. The novel spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a Hulu series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington in 2020.
Reading Little Fires Everywhere
Tension
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Part
"Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over.
"Celeste Ng
Ng grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio and spent her childhood being told what an exceptional, progressive place it was. She wrote the novel partly to examine the gap between how a community describes itself and what it actually does.
Ng's debut Everything I Never Told You won the Amazon Book of the Year in 2014. Little Fires Everywhere was her second novel and sold over three million copies. Reese Witherspoon optioned it before publication.