"Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng

It's been a long time since I read a good story! I started off really enjoying this one . . . and then suddenly on Friday evening I realized this book was making me grumpy. I no longer sympathized with a single character. Weirdly, the things that made the characters unsympathetic were exactly the things that made them realistic and complex, which I would normally love. Not this time, though. I left the book alone for a little while after this epiphany. But tonight (since obviously I would rather read than watch football) I relented and we made up.

Little Fires Everywhere is a story of families and of mother-child relationships and of restriction and freedom and honesty and secrets and art and change. The conventional Richardsons are the central family, in the sense that every thread comes back to them, but Pearl and her mother Mia are truly the the ones the book revolves around. The storyline is complicated enough that I feel daunted by the thought of summarizing it, but at least I can say that the lives of these two families become so entwined that, by the end of the book, few are unaffected. 

However, if that's all I say, I'll be disappointed when my literary amnesia takes over and I want to return to this post to refresh my memory on the plot. So I will add that Mia is a free-spirited and semi-nomadic photographer who has rented a house from small-town journalist Elena Richardson, mother to four Shaker Heights high-schoolers, each of whom forms their own unique bond with Mia or Pearl (or both).

I was surprised to realize after reading that the setting of Shaker Heights (which was almost like a character in the book) is a real live town in Ohio--where the author grew up! That little tidbit almost made the book feel like historical fiction.