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Little Fires Everywhere

By celeste ng, arson, adoption and class divisions ignite tensions in a well-to-do town in ohio.

Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere has been high on my to-read list for a while, since its release back in the Fall of 2017. It’s gotten very good reviews, and it’s in development as a Hulu series (produced by Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington).

I held off on reading it because I had lukewarm feelings about her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You , but I had a chance to read it this weekend and was pleasantly surprised.

Plot Summary

For the Detailed Plot Summary, click here or scroll all the way down .

The book opens with a fire in the well-heeled neighborhood of Shaker Heights — a culmination of simmering tensions in the community.

The town has been divided over a thorny issue involving the adoption of a baby by a couple in the neighborhood. While the couple is well-off with good intentions, the birth mother has been searching for her baby since she left her at fire station in desperation and then subsequently realized her mistake a few days later.

In story about adoption, motherhood, race and social divisions, Celeste Ng presents a thoughtful and gripping drama about community wrestling with difficult questions about character, class and values.

Book Review

I read Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You , a little over a year ago, and had generally positive but fairly lukewarm feelings about it. In Little Fires Everywhere , Ng presents a more confident, compelling story while maintaining the positive aspects – solid writing, empathetically written characters, etc – of her first novel.

Here, Ng draws detailed portraits of a neighborhood, family and friends divided by thorny issues relating to the adoption of a baby. The Richardsons are well-off with a cadre of promising teenage kids, and Mrs. Richardson is close friends with the couple that has adopted the baby in question. Meanwhile, the Warrens are a modest family of two — a single mom and her daughter — who are minorities and less financially stable. Mia Warren is the one who tells the birth mother about the baby’s whereabouts.

I really liked that Ng fleshes out each character in her story, and each one of them feels like an individual. There are no easy answers in this book filled with good intentions and imperfect people caught in an impossible situation. In the process of giving each character a full background, there’s a few parts that drag a little, but it’s a pretty minor issue.

Throughout the story, a range of characters with differing backgrounds, values and mindsets attempt to make sense of the situation, coming to vastly different conclusions. Ng treats each of these viewpoints with respect and diligently attempts to present the best arguments on each side. She handles tricky topics with deftness, discussing things like the inherent difficulty of reconciling the desire for social justice against the desire for social order. Adoption, abortion and even surrogacy all crop up in this book, and Ng handles each with care and measured consideration.

It’s a thoughtful and insightful book, presented through the lens of a neighborhood drama that gives the story its beating heart and provides the book with the action and intrigue to drive the plot forward.

Little Fires Everywhere Movie / Series Adaptation

There’s also a promising adaptation of this book in the works. The Little Fires Everywhere adaptation is planned as an 8-episode Hulu mini-series, slated for 2020. Reportedly, there was a huge bidding war before Hulu won the rights to the series. Reese Witherspoon (as Elena Richardson), Kerry Washington (as Mia Warren) and Rosemary DeWitt (as Linda McCullough) are included on the cast list.

For all the details, see Everything We Know about the Little Fires Everywhere Hulu Limited Series .

Reese Witherspoon as Elena Richardson and Kerry Washington as Mia Warren

Read it or Skip it?

Little Fires Everywhere is one of those books that’s easy to recommend, but is best read if you’re in a thoughtful mood. It’s well written, accessible and poses intriguing questions about complex issues. There’s a lot of stuff to mull over in its brisk 300 or so pages. This has been a popular book club pick ever since its release back in 2017, for good reason.

This is more of a considered, issues-focused book than a plot-heavy thriller or anything like that, so I’d recommend taking that into consideration and deciding if that’s something you’re interested in.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, which I found very engaging. It’s a story that’s well worth a few hours of your time. I’m very interested to see what she comes up with next!

Have you read this or are you thinking about it? Feel free to share your thoughts below! See it on Amazon .

Detailed Book Summary (Spoilers)

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15 comments

Share your thoughts cancel reply.

I really ejoyed this one too. Did you see my review? Sorry, I don’t remember.

hmm not sure, I read a bunch of reviews about this book, but I’ll be sure to check it out!

I will have to get to this one. Thanks for a thoughtful review .

thanks for reading, rosi!

Great review! This sounds like the kind of novel I’d enjoy, and I’ll have to bump it up on my list.

Thank you! Hope you like it if you get a chance to read it!

Heard lots of good things about this, I must read it :)

Thanks for dropping by! Hope you like it if you get a chance to read it! :)

Thank you :)

this sounds interesting, nice review

I bought a copy of this book yesterday because everybody raves about it. I hope I like it as much as you did.

Hope you enjoy it if you end up reading it! Thanks for dropping by!

Great review! This book has been sitting on my shelf for way too long but I hope to tackle it this month for the Asian Readathon. This’ll be my first read by her.

Thank you! And yes this would totally be the perfect book for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage month, what a great idea!

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Review: LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere Celeste Ng Penguin Press; Sept. 12, 2017 352 pp; $27

Buy: hardcover | eBook | audio

In Celeste Ng’s debut Everything I Never Told You , she explored the aftermath of a teen girl’s death and the events preceding it. Ng continues this examination of the weight of family secrets in Little Fires Everywhere . Shaker Heights, a planned community on the outskirts of Cleveland, is home to Elena Richardson, her husband, and her four high-school-aged children. The novel opens with Elena Richardson watching her home burn down, and readers backtrack the circumstances leading to an act of arson.

Months earlier, the Richardsons’ tidy world shifts when wandering photographer Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl move into their rental property. Pearl, assured for the first time that she can settle into a community, befriends the three eldest Richardson children. Lexie, the eldest, takes her under her big-sister/mean-girl wing, while the middle children, brothers Trip and Moody, catch Pearl’s attentions in competitively romantic ways.

As the lives of the Warrens and Richardsons get increasingly tangled up, an adoption custody battle divides the community. Elena Richardson’s friends, who have struggled with infertility and loss, adopt a baby left at the fire station one cold January night. The baby’s mother—a recent immigrant from Canton and a coworker of Mia’s—realizes the loss too late and struggles to gain custody of her child back. Mia and Elena quietly butt heads and Elena, a journalist on a small-town beat, uses her skills to investigate Mia’s past. Inside and outside of the courtroom, the concept of what parenthood is and is not comes into question. More than nature versus nurture, Ng explores the intersection of the public and the private aspects of parenthood and the secrets that both parents and children keep from each other.

Little Fires Everywhere unfurls like a Greek tragedy, and the omniscient narration which weaves past, present, and the all-knowing future, ensures a heavy dose of dramatic irony as the novel climaxes. Elena Richardson is an antagonist for the new age, a self-described do-gooder who views those done good deeds as favor vending machines. Elena is educated and articulate, but ultimately so sheltered in her bubble of a community she refuses to see the hard truths about her family. Like Everything I Never Told You , this novel opens on a crime scene and seeks to answer not so much “who-dunnit” but “why-dunnit.” The disruption of the almost Stepford-esque community of Shaker Heights is satisfying, compelling, and complicated.

Rachel Mans McKenny is a writer, reviewer, and adjunct professor at Iowa State University. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Knee-Jerk Review, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and other outlets. She blogs on her website, tweets @rmmckenny, and is an obsessive Litsy user (@rachelm).

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Pop Culture Happy Hour

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'Little Fires Everywhere' Finds Families Ready To Collide

Linda Holmes

Kerry Washington plays Mia in Little Fires Everywhere . Hulu hide caption

Kerry Washington plays Mia in Little Fires Everywhere .

The great frustration of Little Fires Everywhere , the Hulu adaptation of Celeste Ng's popular novel, is that of the eight episodes, they only made seven available for review.

It matters because Little Fires Everywhere is a story of collision. Mia (Kerry Washington) and her daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood), temporarily living in their car, come to Shaker Heights, Ohio. They collide with the wealthy Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon), who has a house to rent. Mia and Pearl become entangled with Elena and her husband and four children, and eventually, even their friends can't avoid each other.

Those who have seen Big Little Lies will recognize Elena as a more malevolent version of the wealthy, driven, status-obsessed mother Witherspoon she plays there. Ohio and not Monterey, and yet recognizably similar. Those who have seen Scandal may even recognize Mia as a much less well-connected version of the driven survivor Washington plays there. Putting the very different energies of these actresses in conversation with each other is a good, promising idea.

'Big Little Lies' Returns For A 2nd Season

Kerry Washington On Bringing Washington 'Scandal' To TV

Much of the story also takes place in the complex emotional lives of Elena and Mia's children. In particular, Mia worries over the attachment Pearl quickly forms to the Richardsons, and to their nice big house and their leisure time and their stability. Elena is baffled by her youngest, a budding artist and raw nerve named Izzy (Megan Stott), who gravitates toward Mia, both because she's an artist and because she's almost as skeptical of Elena as Izzy is.

The series doesn't quite feel solid, in part because as it progresses, Elena becomes more unambiguously awful. It's a better show when it feels like two very different mothers with very different cards to play, trying in their own ways to offer the parenting they think is needed. But a plot development involving a co-worker of Mia's and a friend of Elena's winds up unbalancing their relationship. While this creates a certain tension, it's hard to know whether that tension will find any resolution.

But again, this is the frustration: The point is that the first seven episodes build and build the pressure on and among all these characters and the worlds they inhabit. Pearl and Izzy feel rejected by their mothers; Elena and Mia feel pushed away by their daughters. Elena's other daughter Lexi is pushed to confront her own privilege, while her brothers Trip and Moody have different attachments to Pearl and different ways of treating her well and poorly. It builds and builds, and either the series sticks the landing in that last episode and it feels worth the ride, or it doesn't, and it doesn't.

With some series, this feels less important. In some cases, the pleasures of a show are such that there's less of a nagging concern over whether it will successfully tie itself together. But this one feels just unsteady enough that if it doesn't land on a coherent final chord, it won't hold together as a whole. The caliber of performers and the strength of the source material makes me optimistic. But in a series about collision, not getting to see what happens when everything collides makes it hard to feel like you've seen it at all.

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Review: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Ignites Over Race and Class

Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington play moms divided by nearly everything in the Hulu mini-series.

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By Mike Hale

The Hulu mini-series “Little Fires Everywhere” is set in the 1990s, a fact that its script and soundtrack take great pains to remind you of: Sugar Ray and Grey Poupon, “Waterfalls” and “Before Sunrise.” There’s even a reasonable onscreen facsimile of the New York Times lobby circa 1997.

Watching it, though — three of its eight episodes appear Wednesday, followed by one each week — you’ll most likely be reminded of a more recent vocabulary. You can almost sense the characters catching themselves just before they refer to one another’s appropriations, microaggressions and code switching. Rarely has a period piece felt this assiduously up-to-date in its racial and gender politics.

Based on Celeste Ng’s best-selling 2017 novel, “Little Fires Everywhere” originated with Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine. And like another Hello Sunshine project, HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” it adapts a literary page-turner by a female author into a starring vehicle for Witherspoon.

More pertinently, it also resembles “Big Little Lies” in the way it evokes the tradition of the Hollywood — you’ll excuse the term — “women’s picture,” movies mostly made by men (Douglas Sirk, George Cukor, William Wyler) that accommodated female stars and domestic situations by wrapping them in sometimes high-pitched melodrama.

And while “Little Fires,” developed by Liz Tigelaar (“Brothers and Sisters,” “Casual”), is staged and edited at a calm, even deliberate, pace, with a variety of melancholy cover versions of peppier ’90s songs, there’s no way to get around the melodramatic core of the material. (Seven episodes were available for review.)

Witherspoon plays Elena Richardson, mother of four and lawyer’s wife in the ur-suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. She also works part-time at the local newspaper — her dreams of a big-city career were scuttled by motherhood — and manages a family rental property, which is how she meets Mia Warren (Kerry Washington), an art photographer, and Mia’s teenage daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood).

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Little Fires Everywhere

• 4.3 • 9.3K Ratings

Publisher Description

The #1 New York Times bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year by People, The Washington Post, Bustle, Esquire, Southern Living, The Daily Beast, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Audible, Goodreads, Library Reads, Book of the Month, Paste , Kirkus Reviews , St. Louis Post-Dispatch , and more “To say I love this book is an understatement. It’s a deep psychological mystery about the power of motherhood, the intensity of teenage love, and the danger of perfection. It moved me to tears.” —Reese Witherspoon From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Our Missing Hearts comes a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides.  Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs. Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster. Named a Best Book of the Year by: People, The Washington Post, Bustle, Esquire, Southern Living, The Daily Beast, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Audible, Goodreads, Library Reads, Book of the Month, Paste , Kirkus Reviews , St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and more

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Reading Celeste Ng’s novel about the complicated neighborly relationships in tony Shaker Heights felt a little like watching a gripping documentary. The main characters—the preppy Richardson family and their bohemian mother-daughter tenants, Mia and Pearl—seem like living, breathing people, which meant we were completely invested in how their dramas would play out. Little Fires is a smart, modern American story about motherhood, community, and civic responsibility that’s full of moral quandaries. We couldn’t stop reading and plan to share it with all our friends.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 17, 2017

This novel from Ng (Everything I Never Told You) is both an intricate and captivating portrait of an eerily perfect suburban town with its dark undertones not-quite-hidden from view and a powerful and suspenseful novel about motherhood. When the eccentric and itinerant artist Mia Warren and her 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, move into a rental house in Shaker Heights, Ohio, one summer, neither they nor their more conventional, affluent landlords, the Richardsons, have any reason to anticipate how dangerously enmeshed the two families will become. Before long, Pearl, enthralled by her first shot at a "normal" life, is spending every day with three of the four Richardson children, Lexie, Moody, and Trip, finding a best friend, a suitor, and a lover in turn. Meanwhile, Isabelle, the youngest Richardson teenager, starts heading over to see Mia, offering to work as her assistant but really looking for an escape. As both Mrs. Richardson and Mia Warren overstep their boundaries, Ng explores the complexities of adoption, surrogacy, abortion, privacy, and class, questioning all the while who earns, who claims, and who loses the right to be called a mother. This is an impressive accomplishment.

Customer Reviews

I want to be mia.

Great read! I enjoyed the character build ups and I have a new found fondness for photography. Only reason for 4 out of 5...if I tell, I’ll give a piece away.

Twists and Turns

I love all the plots twists and the conflict that keeps these characters in motion. This book got me into drama, mystery, and thriller books, and it is definitely one you’ll want to read again and again. The way Ng connects every little fire is outstanding.

Such a great group of stories intertwined together in a way that is both simple and complex all at the same time. Excited to see the Hulu miniseries that’s due to be released sometime in 2020 based on this book. Highly recommend!

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Little Fires Everywhere

EMMY® NOMINATED Starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, Little Fires Everywhere follows the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and an enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. Based on Celeste Ng’s 2017 bestseller, the story explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger in believing that following the rules can avert disaster. more

EMMY® NOMINATED Starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, ... More

Starring: Reese Witherspoon Kerry Washington Joshua Jackson

Creator: Liz Tigelaar

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EMMY® NOMINATED Starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, Little Fires Everywhere follows the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and an enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. Based on Celeste Ng’s 2017 bestseller, the story explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger in believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

Starring: Reese Witherspoon Kerry Washington Joshua Jackson Rosemarie DeWitt Jade Pettyjohn

1 season available (8 episodes)

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Made by Her: Hulu X Reframe

Book to Screen

Editors Roundtable

Finale Teaser

In Conversation With Celeste Ng & Lu Haung

Inside the Episode: Find a Way

Writers Roundtable Part I

Writers Roundtable Part II

Inside the Episode: Picture Perfect

Igniting Conversations

Inside the Episode: Duo

Inside the Episode: Seeds and All

Inside the Episode: Seventy Cents

Inside the Episode: The Spark

Inside the Episode: the Spider Web

Inside the Episode: The Uncanny

Little Fires Everywhere Date Announcement

Next On Episode 4

Next On Episode 5

Next On Episode 6

Next On Episode 7

Oscars Teaser

Series Lookahead

Sparking Conversations

Welcome to Shaker Heights

Women of Shaker Heights

The Women Who Fueled the Fire

Little Fires Everywhere Teaser

Little Fires Everywhere Trailer

About this Show

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