Little Fires Everywhere

Paperback, 388 Pages
Fiction/ Contemporary
By: Celeste Ng
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟.5

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“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.”

🌟 I have read more than 40 books this year, none of which I gave 5 stars. This was the closest thing to 5 stars and I am going to try to explain why in this review.

🌟 I always start my reviews talking about the writing style but I won’t do that here. I have been thinking about what makes a book great and younger me would have said the plot. But after years of reading, I found the most important thing in a story are characters. Think about Harry Potter, City of Bones, Game of thrones and all the big titles. All of them have real characters that are easy to connect and relate to. I am saying all of this because this is a character driven story and Celeste is such a great writer when it comes to characters. No wonder why this has 300,000+ reviews and will be turned into a movie soon. The characters are real humans in my mind that are not good or bad. I could feel them ,why would they do this or that and I empathized with all of them!

🌟 I know that characters alone can’t make a good story without a good plot, which is actually found here. I went into this without knowing what is it about, I actually though that it is about arson and fires but that was just a tiny part of the book because the book starts with the fire and then shows what lead to it and who did it!
The book is more than that, It deals with many subjects but I did not feel that these subjects were forced, It is a small community characters with many small stories shining lights on many topics as abortion and adopting! I also live for small town gossip which was also found here.

🌟 A good character and plot alone do not suffice to make a good story. We need good writing, right? Celeste is also a great writer so it was almost a mix of perfect everything. The writing is smooth and easy to follow, the introduction of characters and timeline were well executed. I have no objections!

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules… was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.”

🌟 Summary: Little Fires Everywhere is a great contemporary that can be read by readers from all different age groups and still be enjoyable, there is something for everyone in this story. I liked the writing, the plot and most importantly, the characters.
The question is Why not 5 stars? I am going to quote my friend Fares and say that I thought hard if it is 4 or 5 stars and usually my 5 stars are easily given, I decided to go with 4.5 stars because there is a very very tiny thing that is missing, I still can’t figure what is it but maybe one day I will know.