Little Fires Everywhere

At first I hesitated commenting about this book considering I am less than half way through.  However, the slow burn of the opening chapters has ignited into quite an inferno and I fear posting spoilers if I wait until I am finished.  Early on, a character is both "perturbed and perplexed" by a photograph hanging in a galley.  I would use both of those words, and add "curious and compelled" to the way I feel about Ng's work thus far.

The residents of Shaker Heights, a manufactured community not unlike Stepford, live cushy, albeit repressed lives.  Kids come home from school, sink into an overstuffed davenport, watch TV shows about how the rest of the world lives, while a housekeeper prepares their meals and tidies up around them.

The Richardsons' world, stands festooned with everything a household needs to be seen as proper. Those trappings of wealth and propriety quiver, shake, and become nervously unsettled when a single mother artist (egads) moves into the community.  Life heats up when the Richardson children become captivated with artist Mia's daughter, Pearl- each in a different way and with a different passion.  Quickly life changes.

There's an adoption sub-plot beginning - should the fancy-white-American-unable to have children- couple be allowed to keep the Chinese child abandoned by the mother who now wants her back?  Don't know where that is going but I have my suspicions.  And that is the flaw I have found so far.  

The author provides us with an omniscient narrator who  intrusively tells us which characters to root for, and what outcomes to hope for. I guess I can go along with that since I have already bonded with one or two characters and am anxious to see how their stories unfold.  I am hoping the best for Izzy even though right from the get-go we figure that she has set fire to the family mansion.  I hope that's a wrong assumption.  Of course, the underdog characters are most interesting, but Ng makes strong cases for the good intentions of many of the Shaker Heights residents.  

So far, I am enjoying this book more than Ng's  first book, Everything I Never Told You.  Both books place teenagers central to the plot. The previous book had not a single adult with working brain cells.  The adults of Shaker Heights are products (or victims) of their heritage and make life choices accordingly.  

That's all I have for you today.  I don't think I'll return to this book next week because, as I said, I don't want to spoil it.  So far, thumbs up to this one.

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