Themes and Colors LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Little Fires Everywhere, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Shaker Heights, Ohio, the real town in which Little Fires Everywhere takes place, was one of the very first planned communities in the United States. The Little Fires Everywhere Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography. At its core, Little Fires Everywhere tells the story of what many well-meaning white people often fail to realize — racism isn't solved by simply making everything appear equal. It's a story of race, class, and privilege, and it's one author Celeste Ng is particularly suited to tell — she herself grew up in Shaker Heights in the ‘90s.
Amazon's Best Novel of 2017
Winner: Ohioana Award • Goodreads Readers' Choice Award 2017, Fiction
Published Worldwide in more than 30 Languages
'Witnessing these two families as they commingle and clash is an utterly engrossing, often heartbreaking, deeply empathetic experience… It's this vast and complex network of moral affiliations—and the nuanced omniscient voice that Ng employs to navigate it—that make this novel even more ambitious and accomplished than her debut… The magic of this novel lies in its power to implicate all of its characters—and likely many of its readers—in that innocent delusion [of a post-racial America]. Who set the littles fires everywhere? We keep reading to find out, even as we suspect that it could be us with ash on our hands.'
— New York Times Book Review
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'Ng has one-upped herself with her tremendous follow-up novel… a finely wrought meditation on the nature of motherhood, the dangers of privilege and a cautionary tale about how even the tiniest of secrets can rip families apart… Ng is a master at pushing us to look at our personal and societal flaws in the face and see them with new eyes… If Little Fires Everywhere doesn't give you pause and help you think differently about humanity and this country's current state of affairs, start over from the beginning and read the book again.' Spiritfarer® - digital artbook for mac.
—San Francisco Chronicle
'Stellar… The plot is tightly structured, full of echoes and convergence, the characters bound together by a growing number of thick, overlapping threads… Ng is a confident, talented writer, and it's a pleasure to inhabit the lives of her characters and experience the rhythms of Shaker Heights through her clean, observant prose… She toggles between multiple points of view, creating a narrative both broad in scope and fine in detail, all while keeping the story moving at a thriller's pace.' Bhakti song shri radhe radhe radhe barsane wali radhe mp3 song download.
—Los Angeles Times
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'Delectable and engrossing… A complex and compulsively readable suburban saga that is deeply invested in mothers and daughters…What Ng has written, in this thoroughly entertaining novel, is a pointed and persuasive social critique, teasing out the myriad forms of privilege and predation that stand between so many people and their achievement of the American dream. But there is a heartening optimism, too. This is a book that believes in the transformative powers of art and genuine kindness — and in the promise of new growth, even after devastation, even after everything has turned to ash.'
—Boston Globe
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'[Ng] widens her aperture to include a deeper, more diverse cast of characters. Though the book's language is clean and straightforward, almost conversational, Ng has an acute sense of how real people (especially teenagers, the slang-slinging kryptonite of many an aspiring novelist) think and feel and communicate. Shaker Heights may be a place where ‘things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance.' But the real world is never as far away as it seems, of course. And if the scrim can't be broken, sometimes you have to burn it down. Grade: A-'
—Entertainment Weekly
A good education, respectable job, beautiful home and a nuclear family — these metrics have long been the emblems of success in America. Many of us have been taught to reach for these goals, but what do we lose in the process?
'Little Fires Everywhere' considers this question by examining two contrasting women in an elite Midwest suburb. Based on Celeste Ng's bestselling novel, the star-powered Hulu mini-series takes place in the author's hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio during the late ‘90s. Shaker was the country's first planned community, designed to be a utopian respite for Cleveland's well-to-do residents. However, the city's stability and prestige bring their own complications.
'Little Fires Everywhere' considers this question by examining two contrasting women in an elite Midwest suburb. Based on Celeste Ng's bestselling novel, the star-powered Hulu mini-series takes place in the author's hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio during the late ‘90s. Shaker was the country's first planned community, designed to be a utopian respite for Cleveland's well-to-do residents. However, the city's stability and prestige bring their own complications.
When I first found out about the television adaptation, I was ecstatic. I had devoured Ng's novel, hooked by its nuanced exploration of class and conformity in a setting I knew well. I grew up in a vastly different Cleveland suburb but transferred to a private school in ninth grade where many of my classmates lived in Shaker. There, I was thrown into a foreign world of beautiful Tudor homes with manicured lawns and picture-perfect families not unlike those in 'Little Fires Everywhere.'
Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon) is the quintessential Shaker resident: mother of four, wife to a successful lawyer and part-time journalist for the local paper. She prides herself on making respectable choices for herself, her family and others around her. Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) is a free-spirited artist and single mother to her daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood). After constantly moving from city to city, she arrives in Shaker to settle down and give Pearl a more stable home.
When Elena rents out her family's second property to Mia and Pearl, the two families soon become inextricable. As Pearl quickly befriends the Richardson children, Mia and Elena clash due to their differing life experiences and approaches to motherhood. Drama and betrayal ensue as secrets unravel in shocking ways.
Little Fires Everywhere Music
Witherspoon plays a similar version of her 'Big Little Lies' persona, but her portrayal of Elena reveals a much more damning critique of upper-class white womanhood. The Hulu series, spearheaded by showrunner Liz Tigelaar, diverges from Ng's source material to more explicitly probe issues of identity and privilege. Most notably, Washington's casting as Mia rewrites the character as a black woman, bringing race to the forefront of the show.
In Ng's version, commentary about race simmers in the subtext; on TV, it erupts in heated arguments between Witherspoon and Washington. During a showdown in episode four, for example, Mia tells Elena, 'You didn't make good choices; you had good choices, options that being rich and white and entitled gave you.' This approach can come across as heavy-handed but proves effective in illustrating key points without the aid of Ng's meticulous narration.
'Little Fires Everywhere' shines because it tackles white racial identity head-on. Most efforts to deconstruct race focus on non-white groups, while whiteness largely remains invisible and thus inculpable. But the neutralization of whiteness only upholds white supremacy, as it allows racial inequity to seep into every facet of American life without a clear perpetrator. Through Elena and Mia's ongoing conflict, the show reveals aspects of the white experience ranging from white privilege to white feminism to the white savior complex.
However, the series' straightforward approach to dissecting race sidelines some of Ng's more intriguing analyses. In both the book and miniseries, Mia and Elena become entangled on opposing sides of a legal battle over a Chinese baby: the biological mother, an undocumented immigrant, fights to regain custody from the white couple that adopted her child. The case takes place in a time when hysteria over 'crack mothers' removed babies from black women and placed them into primarily white foster care and adoption networks. By putting a different face on the phenomenon, Ng shines a new light on how racialized notions of motherhood and family create an unjust child welfare system. In the TV version, the case is mostly reduced to fodder for Mia and Elena's ongoing personal feud.
The show certainly favors melodrama, exemplified by the finale's unrealistic climax which significantly differs from the book's ending. As such, some critics have found fault with what they view as overblown caricatures, particularly Witherspoon's performance. But as someone familiar with Shaker and other elite, white-dominant spaces — including Duke — I found the characters to be empathetic portraits grounded in truth, as ugly as that truth may be.
Ultimately, 'Little Fires Everywhere' offers a compelling breakdown of the white upper-class ethos while delivering electrifying, high-stakes television. Though, if you ask me, I prefer the quiet brilliance of the novel's slow burn.
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