I meant to read Everything I Never Told You ages ago but I think I had read too many novels about family secrets and suburbia at the time and kept putting it off for later. I always meant to get around to it, but with the whole Reese Witherspoon book club and optioning of Little Fires Everywhere, I decided to start with Ng’s follow up. The novel, set in 1998, begins in early summer in suburban Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland, Ohio. Ng hints at previous […]
“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.”
There are a lot of layers involved in Ng’s award winning novel and Little Fires Everywhere employs one of my least favorite tricks- starting in the present with the climatic event before restarting at the true beginning of the story. Mrs. Richardson, a wealthy journalist in the Utopian town of Shaker Heights, wakes up to her house in flames; she was sleeping in after a rough day involving her tenant leaving the apartment she rented and the reader is treated to the events that led to both the […]
What do you do when books have the exact same plot?
So three books came out this year that deal with trans-racial adoption…and somehow they all have the exact same plot. And two have the exact same ending. So that’s annoying. This book is good, mostly. It’s hard to deal with a topical topic and and then have that topic explored in almost exactly the same terms as other books. This book is well-written and the main plotline is interesting and well-handled. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Ann Patchett, domestic-ish, dealing with […]