Review: Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This seemed to be an "it" book recently, so I choose it from Book of the Month when it came up. I really liked it - much more than her last book. It followed the intertwined lives of two families in a neighborhood in Shaker Heights, Illinois. While the neighborhood is planned, and orderly, and standardized, the introduction of a new set of neighbors throws everything out of whack. When one of the town's most upstanding and invested families hires a vagabond single mom as their housekeeper, the families become interconnected in several ways, none of which anyone expected.

I really liked the writing in this book, and I appreciated that Ng developed so many characters, and well. I also liked that several different mother-daughter relationships were contrasted - in a nuclear family, a single-mom family, an adoptive family, an estranged family, and a few other configurations. Really great read.

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