Little Fires Everywhere

 

By Celeste Ng

Mia Warren has a complicated past, a past her teen daughter Pearl knows nothing about. 

All their life together, Mia has been on the run, running from who knows what. Now she and Pearl have settled into a new town, one Mia has promised will be their permanent home. This is a lie, although Mia did not know it at the time. Because the past catches up with Mia and once again they are running away. But this doesn't happen until the end of the story. 

So Pearl finds herself getting to know the family of the woman who is their landlord. Elena Richardson is an upper class woman with a four teen kids and a family history dating back to the early days of her home town, a suburb of Cleveland, Shaker Heights. The duplex that Mia and Pearl move into came to Elena as an inheritance from her mother. 

Mia and Pearl have never had much in the way of money and seeing how the Richardson family lives is a new experience for Pearl. She becomes really close to the two teen boys, Moody and Trip. Moody becomes her best friend and Trip becomes her lover, much to Moody's distress. 

Meanwhile, Elena's youngest daughter, Izzy, finds a refuge from her mother's constant criticism by helping Mia with her art work. Mia is a talented photographer who is still in the struggling artist phase of her career. Some day she will likely be a famous, well-paid photographer, but now she and Pearl live on her work as a waitress and, later, as housekeeper for the Richardsons. 

Mia makes friends with a young Chinese woman, Bebe, who lost track of her baby after she abandoned the baby at a fire station. Mia overhears a friend of Elena's talking about the baby she is adopting who was abandoned at a fire station and she lets Bebe know. When Elena discovers it was Mia who tipped Bebe off, she takes it personally and decides to dig into Mia's past.

Elena's anger is more that just distress at her friend's problems. Part of it is resentment of Mia, whose lifestyle reminds Elena of her own ambitions as a young woman. But Elena's digging upsets everyone and she herself pays the greatest price when her youngest daughter sets the family home on fire and disappears. This happens in the very beginning of the novel, so this is not a spoiler.

So the big mystery is what is Mia's dark secret about her past. Turns out it isn't a dark secret and it isn't even a big scandal. She just changed her mind about something and made her parents angry, adding to their disappointment in her chosen career as an artist/photographer. 

Towards the last quarter of the novel, I was getting bored with it and pretty much skipped through a lot of it. I didn't find Mia's failure to honor her contract shocking. I did find her cavalier treatment of her parents and theirs of her rather off putting. And the rootless lifestyle she put her daughter Pearl through, never staying long enough in one place to really become part of the community. Her solution to her problems is to pack up and disappear once again, taking Pearl along, no choice in the matter. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.