Created by Liz Tigelaar. With Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lexi Underwood. Based on Celeste Ng's 2017 bestseller, 'Little Fires Everywhere' follows the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. The writers of Hulu's 'Little Fires Everywhere' break down the dramatic difference between the book's ending and the series finale. Which explores themes of motherhood, race and class through.
Amazon's Best Novel of 2017
Winner: Ohioana Award • Goodreads Readers' Choice Award 2017, Fiction
Published Worldwide in more than 30 Languages
“Witnessing these two families as they commingle and clash is an utterly engrossing, often heartbreaking, deeply empathetic experience… It’s this vast and complex network of moral affiliations—and the nuanced omniscient voice that Ng employs to navigate it—that make this novel even more ambitious and accomplished than her debut… The magic of this novel lies in its power to implicate all of its characters—and likely many of its readers—in that innocent delusion [of a post-racial America]. Who set the littles fires everywhere? We keep reading to find out, even as we suspect that it could be us with ash on our hands.”
— New York Times Book Review
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Little Fires Everywhere Themes
“Ng has one-upped herself with her tremendous follow-up novel… a finely wrought meditation on the nature of motherhood, the dangers of privilege and a cautionary tale about how even the tiniest of secrets can rip families apart… Ng is a master at pushing us to look at our personal and societal flaws in the face and see them with new eyes… If Little Fires Everywhere doesn’t give you pause and help you think differently about humanity and this country’s current state of affairs, start over from the beginning and read the book again.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
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“Stellar… The plot is tightly structured, full of echoes and convergence, the characters bound together by a growing number of thick, overlapping threads… Ng is a confident, talented writer, and it’s a pleasure to inhabit the lives of her characters and experience the rhythms of Shaker Heights through her clean, observant prose… She toggles between multiple points of view, creating a narrative both broad in scope and fine in detail, all while keeping the story moving at a thriller’s pace.”
—Los Angeles Times
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“Delectable and engrossing… A complex and compulsively readable suburban saga that is deeply invested in mothers and daughters…What Ng has written, in this thoroughly entertaining novel, is a pointed and persuasive social critique, teasing out the myriad forms of privilege and predation that stand between so many people and their achievement of the American dream. But there is a heartening optimism, too. This is a book that believes in the transformative powers of art and genuine kindness — and in the promise of new growth, even after devastation, even after everything has turned to ash.”
—Boston Globe
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“[Ng] widens her aperture to include a deeper, more diverse cast of characters. Though the book’s language is clean and straightforward, almost conversational, Ng has an acute sense of how real people (especially teenagers, the slang-slinging kryptonite of many an aspiring novelist) think and feel and communicate. Shaker Heights may be a place where ‘things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance.’ But the real world is never as far away as it seems, of course. And if the scrim can’t be broken, sometimes you have to burn it down. Grade: A-”
—Entertainment Weekly
Prairie Fires
Mia becomes an enormous influence upon the already rebellious Izzy, primarily in the form of directing and channeling that energy. At one point, Mia tells Izzy about a time in Nebraska when she witnessed the devastating effects of a prairie fire which left everything scorched and turned every last inch of green black. In time, however, the green would not only return, but the entire prairie would become more fertile and new growth make the results of the fire impossible even to imagine. This image is certified as symbolic when Mia later explains how it is representative of the fact that sometimes change requires burning everything down and completely starting over from scratch. It’s meant metaphorically, of course, but, hey, Izzy plays by Izzy’s rules.
Names
Names becomes highly symbolic in the novel as insight into how the ideological philosophy of the rules of Shaker Heights infiltrate the consciousness of its citizens. Elena Richardson is the personification of the adherence to rules and order in the Heights and as a result is almost always addressed as Mrs. Richardson. Her rebellious daughter Isabelle Marie, on the other hand, has adopted a name typically associated with males: Izzy. Pearl was named by her single-mother Mia after Hester Prynne’s illegitimate child in The Scarlet Letter while the Chinese foundling a white Shaker Heights family want to adopt undergoes a particularly extreme form of Anglicized name change: May Ling Chow becomes Mirabelle McCullough.
Jerry Springer
More specifically, The Jerry Springer Show. The novel is set in the 1990’s when the collapse of certain censorship restrictions and the wholesale change of afternoon television programming from rerun-based to talk-show dense brought something into family living rooms never seen before: a daily parade of the world’s worst in humanity struggling to top the degradation aired the day before. The Richardson kids are addicted to Springer’s demonstration of uncontrolled humanity appearing under topics like “I’m Having Your Husband’s Baby!” in a way that transforms the show from mere spectacle into a symbol of the unplanned, uncontrolled, and disordered universe outside the boundaries of Shaker Heights.
Mia’s Photographs
Mia is a photographer, but not merely of the point and click variety. Her images are truly a work of art, requiring intricate hands-on multimedia presentations. What they present—especially those she leaves behind for each member of the Richardson family—are a particularly idiosyncratic form of metaphysical self-portraiture. Not self-portraits in the sense of a “selfie” but in the sense of being a psychological “selfie” in which a secret inner truth known to the subject is revealed in the image in a way that can be only be truly understood by the subject..and the photographer. The images are symbols of the reality hiding behind the façade of the individuals which are in turn symbolic of the façade of perfection hiding the flawed reality of Shaker Heights.
Little Fires Everywhere Food Themes
Shaker Heights
Themes In Little Fires Everywhere
The motto of the real-life town in which the story is set is “Most communities just happen; the best are planned.” The Heights was a carefully planned community of such fame it was featured in an article in Cosmopolitan Magazine in the 1960’s. It has managed to maintain much of its original features through strict implementation of rigidly constructed rules. The city becomes of how authority is disguised as order and how order is a mere illusion in the face of the chaos of reality.