Celeste Ng takes readers on a moral journey throughout her hit Little Fires Everywhere, which challenges its readers to think about life in the sense of both biology and emotion. The book discusses a mother and daughter duo, Mia and Pearl, as they move all across the United States before settling down in an affluent neighborhood they can not afford in Cleveland, Ohio. At the same time, Mia meets a young woman, Bebe who surrendered her baby a year prior who is now getting adopted by a couple that lives in the same neighborhood as the two main characters. 

The book’s central premise pushes the audience to consider the relationship between members of a family in a sense that is not necessarily discussed in everyday life. By doing so, Ng allows her audience the space to decide for themselves what they would do in the situation presented throughout the work before revealing the ending and acknowledging how the situation unfolds. 

Books that can place their audience in a different situation and allow them to feel what the characters are feeling have an upper hand on books that just retell events, because the audience is able to learn something about themselves through it. Literature like Little Fires Everywhere is about learning to place lessons and feelings into a different context in order to better understand how they relate back to the audience’s own lives, a facet of text that is done expertly throughout this work. 

From the writing style to the perspective changes, Ng provides a full-circle moment for the characters of her work and also allows the audience to see why it had to have played out the way it did. Authors that can explain their stylistic choices through their work have the ability to influence their audiences better than most, and Ng does it so well it’s hard to see why she makes the choices she does at times.

 With that being said, I felt as though Ng wrapped her story up perfectly and got her message across to the thousands of people who have read this book: family can look different, and it can have more than one definition. The family dynamics throughout this work vary from family to family so the audience has a full view of each of the characters in terms of the role they play within their own families, a stylistic choice that heavily impacts the ending of the book. 

I rated this book four out of five stars, mostly because it dragged a little bit in the middle and I would have liked to see more of the backstory behind how Mia and Pearl ended up in Cleveland. I feel as though it could have added more depth to both of their characters, but they are still well-rounded as is, so I might just be getting too picky. 

Either way, I would highly recommend this work if you’re looking for something that challenges you to think outside the bounds of your own life and into the world of someone else’s.