Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

• Nice prose.
• Mia is an interesting character.
• Every other character is flat, boring, and unrealistic. None of them seem to act like real people.
• The plot is straight from a Lifetime Originals movie. It includes some shallow explorations of mother/daughter relationships, a vacuous discussion of growing up wealthy vs poor (I’m guessing the author has little experience with either), and several cursory forays into questions of children and families (adoption, abortion, trouble with conception, etc). I wish the book had stuck with just 1-2 of these issues and explored the nuances deeply. Instead, it seemed like most of these were tossed in for emotional appeal rather than asking meaningful questions.

Overall, a quick read with a couple interesting parts, but mostly forgettable.

As usual, I saved my favorite quotes from the book:

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”

Rating: 3 stars