Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. "Best book I read in 2017, by far. Family structure craziness, adoption shenanigans, a free spirit, a troubled daughter … this book kept me up well past 3 a.m., turning page after page."; "This is a great suburban novel by an author who understands that readers like good writing, rich characters and interesting themes – but also like A GOOD STORY. It opens with this line: 'Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.' Needless to say, that got me interested. What’s with this Isabelle? Why did she burn her own house down? The novel then goes back in time in order to answer those questions, through the stories of two families. Ng asks us sympathize with all her multidimensional characters, even those whom we might wish to wholly despise. Unlike so much of the suburban literary genre, it does not rely on adultery and dark pathologies, as if living in the suburbs must be a soul-sucking horror show. That said, the characters are flawed, and those flaws have consequences, such as a nice home burned to a cinder."
