[a:Celeste Ng|164692|Celeste Ng|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1404857644p2/164692.jpg]'s [b:Little Fires Everywhere|34273236|Little Fires Everywhere|Celeste Ng|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1522684533l/34273236.SY75.jpg|52959357] is the most fun I've had reading in ages. I'd feared it was going to one of those books about an Asian American struggling to find his or her place in America, difficulties with traditionally minded parents and all that. There's nothing wrong with such books, but I've read enough of them and I was glad to find that this wasn't another.
 Ng writes about teenagers and women well. The adult male characters are a little thin, but given that they're usually absent from the home scene due to work, it's understandable.
 Ng's prose is fluid and a pleasure to read, though at times sounds a little old fashioned to me, with phrases like "before her very eyes." The only tiny error I found was a description of someone looking at a photograph closely, "as if he might find the answer between the pixels," an impossibility in a photograph taken and printed in 1982. (How do copy editors miss stuff like that?) I also don't think people were using the word "robocall" in 1997 as casually as a character does here; the first known use of the word had only been four years before then and it was not in wide use.
 My biases. The novel takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. I'm not from there but I went to college in Ohio and I had friends who were. Also, I liked reading about people in the suburbs, something I don't much these days.

Now, almost two decades later, well settled in their careers and their family and their lives, as he filled up his BMW with premium gas, or cleaned his golf clubs, or signed a permission form for his children to go skiing, those college days seemed fuzzy and distant as old Polaroids. Elena, too, had mellowed: of course she still donated to charity and voted Democrat, but so many years of comfortable suburban living had changed both of them. Neither of them had ever been radical—even at a time of protests, sit-ins, marches, riots—but now they owned two houses, four cars, a small boat they docked at the marina downtown. They had someone to plow the snow in the winter and mow the lawn in the summer. And of course they'd had a housekeeper for years, a long string of them, and now here was the newest, this young woman in his kitchen, waiting for him to leave so she could clean his house.