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The community of Shaker Heights, Ohio was the first fully planned community to spring up in America. The Shakers built a town beholden to strict aesthetic and moral codes, laying out residential streets, schools, and businesses according to rigorous family-friendly standards. This suburban oasis is the setting for Celeste Ng’s 2017 bestseller, Little Fires Everywhere. The novel takes place in the late 1990s, when Mia, a single mother, and her teen daughter Pearl, arrive in Shaker Heights with all of their belongings packed into a tiny Volkswagon. Mia and Pearl rent half of a duplex from Elena Richardson, a third generation Shaker Heights resident raising her four high school age children in the community. The novel sets the two mothers, Elena and Pearl, opposite each other, exposing the complicated nature of motherhood and socioeconomic difference. Mia is an artist, who has moved all over America with her daughter, living a nomadic lifestyle, often taking on multiple jobs in addition to her photography work to make ends meet. Her free spirited lifestyle is entirely foreign to Elena, who was raised with the cardinal Shake Heights values of order, presentability, and practicality.
As Mia’s daughter Pearl begins spending more time at the Richardson home, Mia becomes concerned that her daughter is being drawn into their world of privilege, one that she and her daughter have always been outsiders in. Meanwhile, Elena becomes suspicious of Mia’s mysterious background and reticence to share personal info, and begins a tumultuous quest to discover the truth of her past. There is an uneasiness between the two women in their personal interactions, as they both sense judgement from the other, but the tension between the two comes to a head during a local adoption scandal. One of Elena’s closest friends adopts an Asian infant who was left at a local fire station, after trying unsuccessfully for years to conceive her own child. When Mia learns about the baby from the Richardsons, she quickly realizes that this baby is the child of Bebe, one of her coworkers at the local Chinese restaurant. Bebe had left her child at the fire station in a moment of panic at her dire financial circumstances after being abandoned by the child’s father, but after getting back onto her feet, she begins searching again for the child that she had lost.
The baby, originally named May Ling, renamed Mirabelle by her new white family, becomes the center of a heated custody battle between her birth mother (who learned of her child’s location from Mia), and the white family in the process of adopting her. The May Ling-Mirabelle debate polarizes Shaker Heights, with Mia on the side of the desperate Bebe, who abandoned her child in a moment of weakness, and Elena firmly on the side of her close friends, the white family whom she believes will provide the child with a better life. The custody battle brings up interesting issues of motherhood, as both women hold fast to their own beliefs about what it means to be a “fit” mother. However, as the lives of Mia and Elena further intertwine, the foundations of their families become shaken, and their core beliefs are placed under the microscope.
The novel offers a highly nuanced portrait of how power dynamics exist in different relationships, specifically relationships between parents and their children, and relationships of a sexual nature. Ng explores how race and class enter into these affairs and create fundamental misunderstandings that can be difficult to navigate. Little Fires Everywhere is in many ways about what it means to belong—to one’s community, culture, family, or social circumstances. Ng expertly navigates how situations like interracial adoption can become minefields of economic and cultural discrimination. She asks what it means to be a “fit” or “unfit” mother, and what it means to take responsibility for the livelihood of another.
Ng simultaneously explores how sexual politics can foster a similar level of imbalanced power between two parties, and how manipulation enters into the equation. Ng is sensitive to the plights of all her characters, and takes great pains to understand the difficulties of motherhood and femininity. Little Fires Everywhere is an immensely readable and propulsive novel, that patiently develops solid characters that fit like puzzle pieces into the narrative. Ng judiciously balances discussions of race, class, and gender in a narrative that manages to never feel overloaded. A rare brilliant and transportive novel.
Little Fires Everywhere was recently adopted into a miniseries for Hulu, produced-by and starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Check it out here.