I read Little Fires Everywhere in a single, breathless sitting. With brilliance and beauty, Celeste Ng dissects a microcosm of American society just when we need to see it beneath the microscope: how do questions of race stack up against the comfort of privilege, and what role does that play in parenting? Is motherhood a bond forged by blood, or by love? And perhaps most importantly: do the faults of our past determine what we deserve in the future? Be ready to be wowed by Ng's writing -- and unsettled by the mirror held up to one's own beliefs. - Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things and Leaving Time

Witty, wise, and tender. It's a marvel. -Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water

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...Our trusty narrator is as powerful and persuasive and delightfully clever as the narrator in a Victorian novel...It is a thrillingly democratic use of omniscience, and, for a novel about class, race, family and the dangers of the status quo, brilliantly apt...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. -Eleanor Henderson, The New York Times Book Review

[Ng] captures her setting with an ethnologist's authority...And there are time-capsule pleasures in her evocation of 1997...The writing is poised. -Wall Street Journal

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

[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

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. Before she became an author she was a miniaturist - almost too perfect for a writer of suburban fiction - and there's a lovely, balanced, dioramic quality to this novel. 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.-LA Times

Riveting...unearthing the ways that race, class, motherhood and belonging intersect to shape each individual...Perhaps Ng's most impressive feat is inviting the reader's forgiveness for Mrs. Richardson -- a woma