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225. Little Fires Everywhere

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Celeste Ng

Genre:  Fiction

352 pages, published September 12, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Little Fires Everywhere opens with the revelation that Isabelle, the youngest of four children in the Richardson family of Shaker Heights, Ohio has burned down the family home.  As the story unwinds, we learn that even in a picture perfect family and community, things are not always as ideal as they seem.  This revelation is laid bare after the arrival of Mia Warren, an artist and single mother to teenage daughter Pearl, who lives life completely on her own terms, with little regard for the consequences.

 

Quotes 

“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.”

 

“Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.”

 

“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”

 

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”

 

“Anger is Fear’s Bodyguard.”

 

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But 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.”

 

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

 

“The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”

 

“I’ll tell you a secret. A lot of times, parents are not the best at seeing their children clearly.”

 

“It bothers you, doesn’t it?” Mia said suddenly. “I think you can’t imagine. Why anyone would choose a different life from the one you’ve got. Why anyone might want something other than a big house with a big lawn, a fancy car, a job in an office. Why anyone would choose anything different than what you’d choose.”

 

“Most communities just happen; the best are planned.”

 

“All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never – could never – set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.”

 

“All up and down the street the houses looked like any others—but inside them were people who might be happy, or taking refuge, or steeling themselves to go out into the world, searching for something better. So many lives she would never know about, unfolding behind those doors.”

 

“The firemen said there were little fires everywhere,” Lexie said. “Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident.”

 

My Take

After reading and thoroughly enjoying Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, I had high expectations for Little Fires Everywhere.  I was not disappointed.  Ng, who has a great talent for character development and dialogue, is a wonderful storyteller who also makes you think.  In Little Fires Everywhere, I was left reflecting on relationships between mothers and daughters and the value and cost of a perfectly planned life.  Highly recommended.

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168. Everything I Never Told You

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Celeste Ng

Genre:  Fiction

304 pages, published August 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is certainly applicable to Everything I Never Told You which tells the story of an American family in the 1970’s.  Parents James and Marilyn and James Lee are an interracial couple.  James is Chinese and has always felt a desire to fit in.  Marilyn is a frustrated stay at home mother who abandoned her Medical School dreams when she got pregnant in college.  Together, James and Marilyn pour all of their expectations and unattained dreams into Lydia, their oldest daughter, with tragic consequences.

 

Quotes 

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you–whether because you didn’t get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”

 

“It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.”

 

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”

 

“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.”

 

“You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”

 

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”

 

“Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, “Show me again, show me another.” Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.”

 

“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”

 

“You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.”

 

“Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn’t look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.”

 

“He can guess, but he won’t ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she’d never told him.”

 

My Take

In Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng tells a compelling story about a dysfunctional family and the dangers of parents who try to work out their own issues through their children.  Ng makes you feel the incredible weight that parental expectations can place on a child.  In my own life, as both a child and a parent, I have had to navigate this difficult terrain.  While we all want to please our parents and see our children succeed (at least most of us do).  We need be true to ourselves and give our children the freedom to do the same.

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