3.5 stars

At the beginning of the 20th century, two railroad moguls and land speculators , the Van Sweringen brothers, decided to create a utopian community, a retreat from the industrial inner-city of Cleveland, Ohio. Shaker Heights was a one of the first planned communities in the the United States and it has become known for its restrictions upon the use of the land and the stringent building guidelines that became known as the Shacker Standards. Shacker Heights likes order and rules and prides itself to be idyllic, progressive, and racially integrated. Its official motto is, “Some communities just happen; the best are planned.” It is also Celeste Ng’s hometown.

It is 1997, and in Shaker Heights lives a family that embodies all these ideals. Mrs Richardson is the matriarch of the Richardson family. She desires a stable, orderly world; she believes that as long as you follow the rules and have an organized life, you can avoid everything that is unpleasant or disastrous. If you have some experience from life, you know that this not the case. Life is alike a grand and experiment, you add new things and wait to see how it works. It is a fascinating thing, but it is also fragile and unpredictable and you never know what could happen next.

Mrs Richardson’s life turns upside down when she rends a small flat she owns, to an unconventional and magnetic artist and her teenager daughter. It was a spontaneous decision, a decision that will provide the spark that will light a little fire. A little fire causes little damage, but many little fires can be disastrous. In the case of Richardson’s family, the little fires in the title will have both literal and metaphorical sense.

Little Fires Everywhere is a multi-layered story. It looks at what means to be a mother, and how mothers and daughters pair to each other in so many different ways. It examines, class, race, the challenges of inter-racial adoptions, and the scope of one’s identity. Spending most of my life as an outsider, I could identify with Mrs Richardson’s younger daughter, Izzy, a teenager that breaks rules, pushes boundaries and wears her individuality like a shield.

The most interesting characters in the novel are the two mothers, Mrs. Richardson and the unconventional artist, Mia. The way the author refers to them, the first as “Mrs.” rather than Elena, the second always as Mia, her first name, shapes not only their personalities, and their view of things, but also the way we feel about them. Other characters appear to be undeveloped, they reveal very little about their emotions and they lack depth, but the interaction between them is interesting and captivating.

Little Fires Everywhere is an American family drama, it is readable, fast paced, some times funny. It is not a challenging book, but it is a beautiful story that you can visualize in your head, it is like watching a movie.