Hi guys, I'm Claire, welcome back. Today I
am here to talk to you about a recent
release, and that is 'Little Fires
Everywhere' by Celeste Ng. A lot of people
seem to be loving this book, and I am
here to offer a dissenting opinion. I was
extremely disappointed by this book in a
number of different ways, and normally I
don't want to spend a ton of time
dwelling on negativity and books that I
didn't like, but I think that with all
the praise going around for this book, I
wanted to see if there was anyone else
out there who felt the same way I did. So
this novel follows the Richardson family,
an upper middle-class family living in
Shaker Heights, Ohio – it is America's
first planned city, and it's sort of
supposed to be this kind of suburban
utopia – so this book is about the
Richardson family, but it's also about
Shaker Heights as a whole and what
happens to it when Mia Warren, a bohemian, free-spirited artist and her young
teenage daughter move into the
Richardson family's rental home. I want
to start with things that I liked about
this book, and one thing I will say about
Celeste Ng is that I find her immensely
readable. I also think that Celeste Ng is
pretty good at dialogue, and she's
extremely good at capturing the
physicality of her characters and the
way that they kind of interact with each
other and occupy space. I really felt
like while I was reading this book that
I was almost watching a movie. Do you
ever read books, especially in
contemporary fiction, where they're told
in a linear way, and they're not really
doing anything particularly challenging
or interesting with the literary form,
but instead they're just telling a
really good story that you can visualize
in your head and that you can easily
imagine being adapted for the screen? I
think that that can be a positive in
that it makes for really entertaining
reading, but I also think it can be a
limitation, so I think that's a good
segue into some of the things that I
didn't like about this book. One of those
flaws is at the basic writing level,
which is that she has a tendency to use
these similes that I don't think are
very good. It was kind of like hitting a
really harsh speed bump while reading, where
everything is going fine, and then she'll
tack this simile onto the end of a
sentence; it's just distracting and sort
of jolts me out of the reading
experience. She says: "Behind it, a
three-story tan house slowly arose, like
a great beast climbing out of the earth.
Front loaders and trucks flitted in and
out of the scene like ghosts caught
unawares. In the last photograph, a
bulldozer razed the dirt to even the
terrain, flattening the landscape like a
popped bubble." She just piles similes on
top of each other, and it makes you think
that perhaps she's trying to
overcompensate for the fact that her
writing is fairly straightforward and
not particularly lyrical. The other thing
that really was an issue in this book is
that I find all of her characters to be
extremely one-note and one-dimensional;
after you learn their main, defining
character traits, nothing about these
characters is surprising in the rest of
the book. And I think part of that is
because she tries to pull this book in
too many different directions – there are
so many storylines and subplots going on
in a book that's really only about 300
pages long, and nobody gets fully fleshed
out in a way that they deserve, and
because of that, Celeste Ng does this
thing where, instead of developing her
characters, she will have these
flashbacks that aren't woven into the
narrative in any way – they're literally,
just like in a movie, a jump cut to 20
years earlier – where a character's whole
personality and the way that they treat
other people is explained through a
bunch of exposition. It just over-simplifies all of these people and all
of their motivations, and it really just
spoon feeds these characters and who
they are to you. What really tanked this
book for me was the way in which all of
these multiple competing storylines
conclude in the last 100 or so pages of
the book, and I would say that Celeste Ng draws
some pretty weird conclusions and
judgments that I thought were either not
fleshed out enough and not explored in
enough depth or in some cases were just
straight-up weird. So I'm gonna get into
some mild plot spoilers – if you want to
go into this book completely blind, I
would recommend that you, you know, see
yourself out now and then come back and
let me know what you think once you have
read this book. So one of the subplots in
this book involves a baby that is left
at a fire station, and then it is, for all
intents and purposes, adopted by this
wealthy white family. And then about a
year later, the mother, who is a Chinese
immigrant, comes back seeking the child
that she gave up. Celeste Ng uses this as a
vehicle to discuss, a little bit, the
issues and the complexities behind
transracial adoption, and basically, the
way that she deals with this very
difficult subject is addressed and
wrapped up in a matter of a couple of
pages in a sort of "climactic" (but not
very climactic) courtroom scene that I
just don't think does justice to how
complicated this topic is. I think she
makes the important point that parents
who adopt kids of a different race need
to be cognizant of the responsibilities
they have in raising a child who isn't
going to look like their parents, and I
think that she introduces how parents in
those situations have a responsibility
that sometimes they don't treat as
thoughtfully or as carefully as they
should, but she also kind of presents
this idea that biological motherhood
trumps all other forms of motherhood or
parenthood or family, and that blood ties
are this unbreakable bond that can never
be matched through adoption or sort of
self-chosen or other unconventional
forms of family. And it also kind of
weirdly implies
that, like, for adoptive parents, an
adopted child could be swapped out with
a different adopted child, and it
wouldn't make a difference. On a kind of
related note, this book talks a little
bit about abortion – it's kind of presented as
this weight that a woman has to carry
for the rest of her life. I don't think
this book was anti-abortion, but again,
Celeste Ng has some kind of weird ideas
about motherhood, and she's really
fixated on motherhood and women's
roles as mothers. And then the thing that
bothered me the most about this book is
that I really don't think she
treated all of these characters fairly. I
feel like certain characters were
demarcated as villains, and other
characters were practically canonized as
saints. Mrs. Richardson is a character
who has a lot of flaws and is super
unlikable in a lot of ways, but I found
myself almost rooting for her just
because Celeste Ng seemed so against
her. Likewise, the character of Mia, I
think, is supposed to be super likable,
but it is so clear that Celeste Ng views
her as this person with higher morals
and higher principles because she
chooses to live unconventionally, and it
just really grinded my gears because the
character of Mia does some really
fucking cruel and selfish things that
are never really criticized by Celeste Ng.
This book is dedicated "To those out on
their own paths, setting little fires."
Apparently if you're a rebel and you
flout convention, you can do really
shitty fucking things but still have the
moral high ground over everyone else who
lives in a suburb. I don't need all these
characters to be equally likable or
equally detestable, I just need Celeste Ng to not be telling
me who I should be rooting for and who I
shouldn't be rooting for. So I don't know
guys, if you've read the book, let me know
what you thought about the characters, if
you think that my criticisms are
legitimate, or if I misread what she was
trying to do. Just let me know what you
think, I would love to talk about it.
That's all I have for you right now, guys – thanks so much for watching, and
I'll see you next time.
