Bogormen

Title: Little Fires Everywhere
Author: Celeste Ng
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 2/5
# pages: 348
Date read: July, 2018

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours 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 with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When the Richardsons' friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family – and Mia's.


I'd heard people rave about this book for ages, so it's possible that my expectations were just too high, and I ended up being rather disappointed by it.

My problems with it:
- It was really, really slow to start! I'm glad I'd been told that it would pick up around page 100 or I'd have given up before then.
- I did not care for the writing style at all. As a rule, I don't care for books that start at the ending and then work their way back, and this one even had flashbacks within the flashbacks! FAR too much exposition.
- Very, very few sympathetic characters, and a few really dysfunctional ones.
- Unbelievable neighbourhood. Stepford Wives v.2.0?
- Too many decisions and judgments being made on assumptions rather than facts.
- Much too open an ending.

I can tell objectively that it was well written, but it didn't work for me.