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In this sophomore novel, Celeste Ng returns with her elegant, clear, and concise writing style.  Little Fires Everywhere is literary without being dry, and thrilling without being trite.  It’s highly engaging, and a quick read, but it’s still slow paced (which sounds contradictory but somehow applies).  Ng is an enormously talented writer; she is brilliant at sneaking little details into the story, and revealing the underlying motivations of each character.  Little Fires Everywhere took me on a roller coaster of emotions, from joy to confusion to pure anger, but I believe that to be part of the reason it’s so enjoyable.

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over.  After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow.  People are like that, too.  They start over.  They find a way.”

-Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

From the jacket:

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 wit her teenage 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 wit 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.

“It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother?  Was it biology alone, or was it love?”

-Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

Ng uses an assortment of events in this novel to tell the real story: that of the relationship between mothers and daughters.  The theme of motherhood is explored through Mia and her daughter Pearl, through Elena and her four children (centered around Izzy), and through the custody battle that divides the town and makes everyone question what makes a mother.  Looking back, I realize that I didn’t exactly like any of the characters- Elena was cruel, Izzy was annoying, and Mia was frustrating… but in some way their unlikeability made the story more impactful.  Since there was no clear favorite character, I could separate myself from any bias I might’ve had to truly understand the messages Ng meant to portray.

“The problem with rules… was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things.  When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.”

-Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

Overall, I really enjoyed Little Fires Everywhere, but I don’t think it measured up to the sheer brilliance of Ng’s 2014 debut, Everything I Never Told You, which just so happens to be one of my all time favorite novels.  In comparison, Little Fires felt a bit more disorganized in terms of plot, with a less memorable story and bland characters.  However, Ng’s writing in this second novel is stronger and and even more skillfully constructed.  Though Little Fires Everywhere was a slight disappointment, Celeste Ng remains a favorite author of mine.

You can find this book on Goodreads and Amazon.

Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is one of those novels that you either love or hate, and after turning the last page, I can happily say that I fell in love with this book.  I found it to be highly captivating, with memorable and, yes, interesting characters that seemed so real to me.

From the back cover:

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable.  Decades later the bond remains, but so much else has changed.  Not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence.  The kind of creativity rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty- not to mention age fifty.  Wolitzer follows her characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, resigns herself to a more practical occupation.  Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing guitar and becomes an engineer.  But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful- true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding.  Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters, The Interestings explores the way that class, power, art, money, success, and friendship can shift and tilt precariously over the course of a life.

“People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.”

-Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

The Interestings follows a group of six people from their teenage years at a summer camp in the Berkshires to complicated adulthood in their fifties.  Jules Jacobson is the main voice of the story, though friends Ethan, Ash, Jonah, and camp directors Manny and Edie make frequent appearances.  One of the things I appreciated most about these characters is that they felt so natural and realistic; each person had their imperfections, and those flaws made them who they are.

The only complaint I have about The Interestings is that I wanted more, specifically more on Jules’s teenage life outside of Spirit-in-the-Woods camp: more of her life during the school year, more of an explanation of her father’s death, etc.  Though the novel is over 500 pages (depending on the edition), I believe it was missing some key background information that could have gone to great heights to improve the story.

“You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation.  You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.”

-Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

Meg Wolitzer expertly captures the human experience and the flaws that sometimes, unfortunately, define who we are.  The Interestings is a novel about art, love, life, and death told through an ensemble of characters who have certainly experienced them all.  I would highly recommend this novel and I look forward to reading more of Wolitzer’s work!

You can find this book on Goodreads and Amazon.