Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
Summary
In the meticulously planned Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights in the late 1990s, Elena Richardson rents a modest duplex to Mia Warren, an itinerant photographer, and Mia's teenage daughter Pearl, who quickly becomes close with all four of the Richardsons' children. Mia works odd jobs, including cooking at a local restaurant alongside a coworker named Bebe Chow, and eventually as the Richardsons' own housekeeper, an arrangement that puts Mia's private, wandering life under close and increasingly resentful observation from Elena. When Elena's friends, an infertile couple named the McCulloughs, adopt an abandoned baby, Mia realizes with a shock that the child is actually Bebe's own daughter, given up during a period of desperate crisis, and Mia helps Bebe fight to win her back in a custody battle that splits the town along lines of class and race. Digging for leverage, Elena investigates Mia's past and uncovers that Pearl was conceived as a surrogate for a wealthy couple who intended to raise her; Mia fled with the newborn rather than hand her over as agreed. Meanwhile, among the Richardson children, Pearl begins a secret relationship with the oldest son, Trip, hurting Moody, who has loved her himself, and the Richardsons' misfit youngest daughter, Izzy, grows closer to Mia than to her own mother, coming to see Mia's chosen, improvised life as everything her own family's ordered one is not. When Elena finally confronts Mia and orders her out, Mia tells Pearl the full truth of where she came from, and the two leave town together. Izzy, devastated by what she has learned about how casually her own family used and discarded people around them, sets fire to each of her siblings' bedrooms before running away herself, burning the Richardsons' house to the ground without knowing her mother is still inside it.
Ng builds the novel around two mothers whose radically different ideas about family, one rooted in order and inherited privilege, the other in improvisation and hard won independence, are never allowed to sit as simply right or wrong, and the custody plot in particular forces a reader to hold real sympathy for people on every side of it. It reads with real momentum for a book this interested in ambiguity, and its title's literal payoff, actual fire consuming the Richardsons' house, lands as inevitable rather than as a metaphor made real for its own sake.
Historical Context & Significance
Little Fires Everywhere won the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, a readers' vote; no major juried literary prize marked its publication. Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, called Ng a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in America, and the San Francisco Chronicle praised it as a finely wrought meditation on motherhood and privilege. Ng grew up in Shaker Heights herself and has said that revisiting it as an adult made her newly aware of how unusual the town's deliberate, planned equality actually was, and how much strain sat underneath it.
Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington starred in and executive produced Hulu's eight episode 2020 adaptation, which pushed the novel back onto the New York Times bestseller list at number one for three weeks, more than two years after Penguin Press first published it in September 2017.