Every small town has its secrets—mysteries of scandal, heartbreak, and tragedy lurk beneath the facade of residential bliss. In of Celeste Ng’s 2017 fictional novel, Little Fires Everywhere, the town of Shaker Heights, Ohio plays into this cliché. Ng, a Shaker Heights native, invigorates small town gossip into a narrative of two families from different racial backgrounds as they navigate their differences and secrets. Ng proves herself a trailblazer of a modern narrative of class structure, race, and motherhood, and presents readers with a crucial introspective look at implicit bias and stereotypes in a time of burgeoning racial injustice and social unrest. 

        The novel, set in the 1990s, follows two women: Elena Richardson, mother of four and wealthy townie, and Mia Warren, a traveling artist and Elena’s newest tenant. Elena, intrigued to uncover Mia and her fifteen-year-old daughter Pearl’s intentions in “the first planned community” of Shaker Heights, begins to dig into Mia’s mysterious past, bringing her own family along with her. Little Fires Everywhere calls into question which people we believe to be transparent with us, and whether or not it is safe, or in our best interests, to expose one’s past misdoings.

        Ng is unrelenting in her powerful delivery, observing her characters’ psyches and actions from a third person omniscient point of view. She clocks the novel backward from the climax by setting fire to the perfect Richardson estate on the first page, effectively shrouding the preceding events—and potential suspects—in mystery. Ng plays off this initial reveal by placing the reader headfirst in a rapidly evolving exposition, giving rise to character conflict and peaked tensions at the onset. The rapid pace and deep breakdown of characters’ backstories and thoughts translate effectively into a television series format; the miniseries version of the book, starring Reese Witherspoon as Elena and Kerry Washington as Mia, premiered on Hulu in March 2020.

        The core of Ng’s narrative constitutes the clash between parenting styles in the Richardson and Warren households and the intersection of two dissimilar families on grounds of economic status and race. Mia eventually begins working as a housekeeper in the “vast and gleaming” Richardson abode, in hopes of getting a more intimate look at their family dynamics to inspire her latest art project. She grows closer to Elena, who, feeling pulled by her journalistic instinct, grows increasingly skeptical of Mia and her intentions in Shaker Heights. In the background, their children become friends and find ways to resist their mothers based on the ways of the latter household. 

        Ng places readers in a jigsaw puzzle-like world of reciprocal infatuation among the lifestyles of both families; the omniscient narrator style makes it difficult for the reader to definitively choose sides, as she shifts seamlessly between each family, showcasing flaws, downfalls, and sympathetic qualities of both. While the Richardsons “dazzle [Pearl] with their easy confidence, their clear sense of purpose” and “state of domestic perfection,” Moody, Elena’s son and earliest friend to Pearl, finds that “the more time he spent with Mia and Pearl, the more fascinated he became with them.”

        Although some of the conflict centers around the friction between mother and child, Mia and Elena’s relationship proves to be the most thought-provoking dynamic. The two face off in pursuit of discovering what motivates them, until they realize that their obsession with one another and the biases they hold both motivate them and prove to be a shared flaw. Ng reveals herself as a powerful literary mastermind by dynamically bouncing from one character’s story to the next until, at the pinnacle, she sets their entire world aflame.