Just Finished Reading Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

At that same Orlando airport bookstore where I found John Green's recent "Turtles" novel, I also came across Celeste Ng's 2017 book Little Fires Everywhere...and resolved to make it my next reading project.  It is set during the late 1990s...before the age of smartphones and when pocket pagers were considered cool among the high school crowd...in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Shaker Heights.  The Richardsons are an established, affluent family of six...husband, wife, their two daughters and two sons...all the children are teens...living in comfort in their big house.  They rent out to others on their other property, a duplex down the road.  Among these tenants is a mother and daughter family, Mia and Pearl Warren. Mia, who moves Pearl and herself a lot from city to city and seems to be concealing an old secret, is getting by working odd jobs and selling her pictures, photography as an art form being her big passion in life.  Pearl gets introduced to the Richardson family and develops different levels of friendship with the children...except young Izzy (from Isabel), who looks askance at her family's privileged, materialistic outlook on the world and is very sensitive to matters of justice.  The two families eventually look as if they are going to hit if off very well with each other until a bitter child custody case erupts between a baby's natural Chinese mother who had left her at a fire station and the upper-middle class white family that adopts her...

Little Fires Everywhere, although looking closely at the personalities, attitudes, and relationships of teen-agers, is more than a young adult novel.  It raises the question of how people in our country, in the midst of so many social safety nets, can still find themselves in such a state of economic desperation that they would take extraordinary measures...such as that young Chinese woman.  Also, in custody cases should the natural parents' ethnicity be considered, implying if so that an ethnic/cultural group has collective rights as opposed to individuals? I found it all intriguing and the author masterfully laid it all out, but her portrayals of Pearl and the Richardson children to me was brilliant.  My favorite character?  Who else but Izzy!  Little Fires Everywhere begins with the burning down of the Richardson house, so in revealing this information I'm not spoiling the plot.  But who started the fire...and evidence is clearing showing that it was deliberate.  A couple of the children already are blaming "crazy" Izzy, who among everyone in the family is nowhere to be seen...guess you'll have to read it to find out the answer...