Traveling Sisters Group Read Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere is a remarkable, sensitive, insightful and beautifully told story that shines a light on parenthood, class, race and familial relationships.

This story follows two very different women and their families over the course of a year. Mia and her daughter Pearl rent an apartment from Mrs. Richardson who lives in the affluent and perfectly planned neighbourhood of Shaker Heights. We soon learn how different their lives and backgrounds are from one another by how they raise their children and how different their relationships are that they have with their children.

Mia is artistic and a free spirit who makes art and not money who is always moving from place to place while Mrs. Richardson is comfortably stable. We think both women had good intentions for their actions and we think you could see by the way they grew up how that influenced their principles and decisions.

Ng does a fantastic job with the character development allowing us to really get to know each character and see how really different they are from one another. We found it remarkable in how skillfully she allowed us to see the story from two very different sides and from the two very different women. As the story progresses we really liked how our feelings changed about some of the characters as we were learning more about them. We loved how Ng had such a knack at intertwining all the characters and how she really took the time with each character so we could really get to know them. That is where we think she really shines!

Celeste Ng delivers an emotionally complex multi-layered rich family drama here that was deeply impressive with a few different themes interwoven into the storyline which we thought she did an absolutely fantastic job with that had most of us swooning over her ability to provoke such strong feelings from us.

Highly recommend Little Fires Everywhere as it left some of us wanting more from the author and we will be reading Everything I Never Told You in the near future and for some sisters who have read it will be rereading it.

Thank you so much to Edelweiss, Celeste Ng, and Penguin Press for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book to read and review.