Little Fires Everywhere
I'm not sure where the line is drawn between period piece and historical fiction. I'm sure there's some official criteria when it comes to defining the two. But without looking that up, I'm going to call Little Fires Everywhere a period piece, mostly because I can't quite handle historical fiction being set during my childhood. I'm not that old yet.
This book is set in the late 90s, the year I was in sixth grade. There were a lot of background references to popular music, television shows, and movies that I recognized. That bit of nostalgia was really fun, but it was just icing on the cake that is this story.
Little Fires Everywhere is about motherhood. There are two central families. Mrsh Richardson has four kids, all in high school. She has a great husband, a nice house, a career as a journalist. She's done everything right and has followed all of the rules. Then Mia and Pearl move in to the neighborhood and shake her to her core. Mia is an artist who works odd jobs to cover the bills between making and selling her photographs. She's dragged her daughter all over the country, never staying anywhere for more than a few months. But this time she's determined to make a more permanent home for her daughter.
The two families quickly become entwined, though they ultimately end up on different sides of the central conflict. A local family is in the process of adopting a baby who was found abandoned at a fire station when the mother sues to get custody back. And so the book becomes about which family is more deserving and what does it mean to be a mother and what does it mean to give a child the best life possible. The book ultimately comes down definitively on the side of biological motherhood, which isn't a stance I'm entirely sure I agree with. There's a lot to be said for both adoption and surrogacy, and while Ng tries to paint a complete picture of the issue, I think she ends up doing a disservice to non-biological motherhood. Then again, this is an incredibly sticky situation with no easy answers.
Reading this book was painful, and it made me think deeply about these issues in a way I appreciated (while also appreciating that I don't have to confront these issues in my own life). The book wanders a bit, trying to give backstory and fair shake to every single character (including the drug dealer who is mentioned once during the trail, a coworker of the baby's mother, but who clearly has his own extenuating circumstances). I think the ending was as happy as it could be for a book like this, where someone is bound to get hurt. It was certainly satisfying. And I'll definitely be reading whatever Ng writes next.
This book is set in the late 90s, the year I was in sixth grade. There were a lot of background references to popular music, television shows, and movies that I recognized. That bit of nostalgia was really fun, but it was just icing on the cake that is this story.
Little Fires Everywhere is about motherhood. There are two central families. Mrsh Richardson has four kids, all in high school. She has a great husband, a nice house, a career as a journalist. She's done everything right and has followed all of the rules. Then Mia and Pearl move in to the neighborhood and shake her to her core. Mia is an artist who works odd jobs to cover the bills between making and selling her photographs. She's dragged her daughter all over the country, never staying anywhere for more than a few months. But this time she's determined to make a more permanent home for her daughter.
The two families quickly become entwined, though they ultimately end up on different sides of the central conflict. A local family is in the process of adopting a baby who was found abandoned at a fire station when the mother sues to get custody back. And so the book becomes about which family is more deserving and what does it mean to be a mother and what does it mean to give a child the best life possible. The book ultimately comes down definitively on the side of biological motherhood, which isn't a stance I'm entirely sure I agree with. There's a lot to be said for both adoption and surrogacy, and while Ng tries to paint a complete picture of the issue, I think she ends up doing a disservice to non-biological motherhood. Then again, this is an incredibly sticky situation with no easy answers.
Reading this book was painful, and it made me think deeply about these issues in a way I appreciated (while also appreciating that I don't have to confront these issues in my own life). The book wanders a bit, trying to give backstory and fair shake to every single character (including the drug dealer who is mentioned once during the trail, a coworker of the baby's mother, but who clearly has his own extenuating circumstances). I think the ending was as happy as it could be for a book like this, where someone is bound to get hurt. It was certainly satisfying. And I'll definitely be reading whatever Ng writes next.
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