Summary: Little Fires Everywhere

The GIST

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng opens with a house burning and spends the rest of its pages explaining how the match got lit. Published in 2017 as Ng's second novel, it is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the planned and prosperous Cleveland suburb where she grew up, during the late 1990s. Two families meet there: the Richardsons, comfortable, successful and devoted to doing things properly, and the Warrens, a single mother who makes art and her teenage daughter, who have never stayed anywhere long. Their children pull the two households together, and a bitter fight over who should raise a baby drives the mothers apart.

Ng has said that writing about her hometown was like writing about a relative: you see what is wonderful in them and love them, and you also know every quirk and flaw. That double vision is the book's gift. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2017, earned a starred review from Kirkus, became a fixture of book clubs, and returned to the top of the New York Times fiction list for three weeks in April 2020 when a miniseries adaptation appeared. The San Francisco Chronicle's reviewer described it as a meditation on motherhood and on the dangers of privilege, and as a warning about how the smallest secrets can tear families apart.

The Story

The first sentence sets the tone of a whole town leaning over the fence: "Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer." What they are talking about is the Richardson house, which has just burned. The firemen report "little fires everywhere," several starting points, probably an accelerant, no accident. Nobody in the family doubts who did it. Izzy, the youngest of the four Richardson children and the one who has always been trouble, is missing, and only her brother Moody suggests she deserves the benefit of the doubt. Then the novel turns around and walks back through the previous year to show how they all got there.

Shaker Heights is a place where everything is planned: the curve of the roads, the colors the houses may be painted, even, its residents like to think, the successful lives their children will lead. The book's epigraphs quote the suburb's own old advertising, which promised protection against unwelcome change and called the place a Utopia. Nobody believes in that promise more than Elena Richardson, a journalist and mother of four whose creed is that rules exist for a reason. Ng puts it in a line the whole novel tests: "Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn't, you might burn the world to the ground."

Elena owns a rental house on Winslow Road and lets its apartments for less than they are worth to people she considers deserving, which she thinks of as a quiet form of charity. Her new tenants are Mia Warren, an artist who works in photography, and her daughter Pearl. They have lived on the move for as long as Pearl can remember, Mia scraping money together as she goes; here she takes part-time shifts at a Chinese restaurant called Lucky Palace and sells her photographs through a dealer in New York. This time, Mia has promised, they will stay, so that her bright daughter can have something like a normal life.

Pearl is quick, observant and hungry for exactly what Shaker Heights offers. Moody, who is her age, falls for her first and becomes her friend, and through him she meets the others: polished, indulged Lexie; handsome Trip, on whom Pearl develops a crush of her own; and prickly Izzy. Soon Pearl is at the Richardson house every afternoon. What dazzles her is not really the money. It is the ease, the way these children seem at home in the world and sure of their place in it, even in their pajamas. The gap between the families shows in small moments, as when Pearl has to steer a shopping trip with Lexie toward a thrift store because that is what she can afford, and Lexie cheerfully treats it as a hunt for vintage finds without ever noticing why they are there.

Mia notices everything. Uneasy at how completely her daughter is being absorbed, she accepts when Elena offers, with a touch of condescension, to hire her as housekeeper at the Richardson house. Mia takes the job mainly to keep an eye on Pearl, having learned that people set on what they believe is a good deed cannot be talked out of it. Inside the house she finds an unexpected ally in Izzy. Mother and youngest daughter have been locked for years in a pattern of pushing and restraining that neither can remember beginning, and Izzy, treated as the family's black sheep, is drawn to a woman who takes her seriously. She asks to be Mia's assistant and starts spending her afternoons on Winslow Road. When Izzy is furious that the orchestra teacher has racially abused a Black classmate, it is Mia's suggestion that leads her to jam the school's doors with toothpicks in revenge.

Then comes the event that splits the town. Elena's old friends Linda and Mark McCullough are adopting a baby they have named Mirabelle Rose, and the Richardsons attend her birthday party. Hearing about it, Mia realizes that the baby is the daughter her coworker at Lucky Palace has been searching for. Bebe Chow, struggling with postpartum depression and with no money, left her infant, May Ling, at a fire station, and has spent more than a year trying to find her. Bebe cannot afford a lawyer. Mia tells her to go to the local news. The story explodes, Bebe wins visitation rights and the free services of a lawyer, Edward Lim, and Shaker Heights divides into camps over one question: does this child belong with the loving, well-off couple who have raised her, or with the mother who gave birth to her and wants her back?

When Elena learns that it was her own tenant and housekeeper who tipped Bebe off, she takes it personally on her friend's behalf. She is a reporter, she has contacts who owe her favors, and she begins to dig into where Mia Warren came from and why she has never stopped moving. At the same time the Richardson children are making secrets of their own. Pearl and Trip begin a relationship they hide from everyone, including Moody. Lexie finds herself in trouble she cannot tell her mother about and leans on Pearl, and then on Mia, to get through it. Every one of these secrets is a small fire, and Elena's investigation is about to bring them all into the same room. Where the custody case lands, what Elena uncovers, and how that year leads back to the burning house are the book's to tell.

What It's Really About

Above all, motherhood. The novel sets pairs of mothers and daughters side by side: Mia and Pearl, Elena and her two very different girls, Linda McCullough and the baby she has renamed, Bebe and the daughter she lost. Around them, girls keep looking for mothers in other people's houses, Pearl in Elena's kitchen and Izzy at Mia's worktable. The question one reviewer drew from it is the one book clubs argue over: what makes someone a mother, love or blood? Ng refuses to make it easy. The McCulloughs are kind people with good intentions; Bebe made a desperate choice and regretted it within days. Reviewers praise how the novel gives each side its best argument.

It is also about rules and those who break them, the tension one critic called the pull between social justice and social order. Elena has built her life on the belief that planning averts disaster. Mia lives by her own code and trusts instinct over structure. Neither woman is a villain, and the characters who look simple at first turn out to have long histories, including the two mothers, whose younger years the book revisits.

Under that runs a sharp study of class, race and good intentions. Ng chose a transracial adoption because, as she has said, it touches class, race and motherhood all at once. The Kenyon Review reads the novel as a portrait of a town that believes it does not judge and is judging at every step, from Elena's charity, which expects gratitude, to Lexie's obliviousness in the thrift shop. The same review notes that perspective is the book's deepest subject: the children are assigned to rewrite fairy tales from another character's side, and Mia's altered photographs make viewers doubt what they see, as when Elena stares at a picture of a dancing woman who seems to become a spider in a web. That reviewer also wished the many characters of color had been given more of the telling themselves.

Readers love it for its construction as much as its ideas. Starting at the end gives every earlier page a hum of foreshadowing, and one reviewer said each sentence felt deliberate, turning her into a detective. The narration moves through many minds, the pace is a slow build with many threads, and the result reads, in another reviewer's words, like neighborhood drama with a beating heart.

Who Should Read It

Pick it up if you like family dramas that double as arguments you will want to have afterward, about parenting, privilege, adoption and what a good community owes the people who do not fit it. It suits book clubs, readers of character-driven literary fiction, and anyone who grew up in a place that prided itself on being perfect. It is thoughtful rather than fast, a novel of issues and people more than plot twists, and it lingers.