Bookish Thoughts

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 wh...

I was expecting this book to be sad. It opens with the death of a sixteen-year-old girl and follows the aftermath as her family slowly falls apart. But somehow I wasn't quite prepared for just how unrelentingly tragic it is. The tragedy stretches back years, detailing the forced compromises and abandoned dreams that led to a teenage girl with more secrets than her family could even begin to suspect. Lydia's death is the mystery at the heart of the book. Was it murder or suicide? What could have compelled her to leave her house in the middle of the night? Answering these questions takes you back to not just Lydia's childhood, but to her parents' courtship and their childhoods as well. Her father is Chinese-American, and he spend his whole life wanting to blend in. Her mother is determined to be a doctor, to study physics, to do anything but end up as a housewife like her mother. But those dreams are deferred in favor of her kids, and then deferred again and again unt...