A lovely story by Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere is an engaging study of just about any mother/child situation you could think up. It sets up opposing forces, such as affluence vs. poverty, order/rules/decorum vs. chaos/free spiritedness/change, to name a few. But it doesn't force one over the other. It allows the complexity of difficult situations in which there is no clear right or wrong. Ng allows the reader to sympathize with all sides of an issue.
Yeah, I liked this book.
Page 7: The firemen said there were little fires everywhere," Lexie said. "Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident."
Page 32: This was how Moody made a decision he would question for the rest of his life. ... If he had kept her to himself, perhaps the future might have been quite different.
Page 79: In the first week of school, after reading T.S. Eliot, she had tacked up signs on all the bulletin boards: I HAVE MEASURED OUT MY LIFE WITH COFFEE SPOONS and DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH? and DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?
Page 88: She kept thinking of Mia's smile that day in the kitchen, the capability she saw there to delight in mischief, in breaking the rules.
Page 122: 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 existed at once.
Page 160: She wondered which was the real world.
Page 161: All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control.
Page 239: Each time, faced with this impossible choice, she came to the same conclusion. I would never have let myself get into that situation, she told herself. I would have made better choices along the way.
Page 269: But the problem with rules, he reflected, was they implied a right and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.
Page 304: Sex changed things, she realized - not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone.
Page 306: "I don't want to. But we have to." Mia held out her hand. Pearl, for a moment, imagined herself transforming into a tree. Rooting herself so deeply on that spot that nothing could displace her. ... She took Mia's hand, and Pearl, uprooted, came free and followed her mother back to the car.
Page 310: She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person who she'd carried alongside her.
