BOOK REVIEW | Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

4/5 stars

Celeste Ng’s latest work is a heartbreaking story about mothers and daughters, right and wrong, morality and reality, the wealthy and the not so wealthy. Little Fires Everywhere is the perfect title for this book, in which many polarizing controversies are littered throughout. I absolutely adored Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, and was beyond thrilled to win an advance copy of her latest book through Goodreads. Ng has created another special book that fans of EINTY will be sure to love.

In the picturesque town of Shaker Heights, Ohio, the Richardson family is the portrait of happiness and success. Elena and her husband are successful, and their 4 children, each 1 year apart, are well rounded and popular. Izzy, the youngest, doesn’t necessarily fit in with her family – she is a wild spirit with a knack for getting into trouble. Elena struggles to understand her youngest daughter, leading to a tenuous relationship.

When an artist, Mia, and her teenage daughter, Pearl, move into town and begin living out of the Richardson’s rental property, both families are inevitably changed. Elena values order, rules, structure. Mia moves from town to town whenever she loses her artistic inspiration, raising Pearl in an unsettled life. The longer they remain in Shaker heights, the more Pearl sets down roots. She befriends the Richardson children, often fantasizing about life in their family, while Izzy, never feeling comfortable with her own mother, finds a connection with Mia. A legal battle soon takes over Shaker Heights, leaving each family on opposite sides of the argument. Ng navigates both sides of the debate – as a reader I didn’t know where to stand. This battle shapes the later half of the story, ultimately revealing unexpected parts of both Elena’s and Mia’s pasts.

Ng has a way of drawing out qualities in her characters that capture who they are, such as the way Elena subtly leaves a cash donation on her way out of a museum. In one beautiful passage, Mia contemplates a parent’s need to touch their children, to hold them and breathe them in, and how over time the moments lessens. This nearly broke my heart; Ng’s writing is no less impactful than in her debut. I question the choices that some of the characters make towards the end, but felt safe in Ng’s capable hands. In some ways, I wish it ended differently, but I think it’s because wasn’t ready for the story to end.

 

BOOK REVIEW | Final Girls by Riley Sager

3.5/5

I’m a huge fan of slasher movies. Huge. For me, the ultimate in horror is a crazed maniac, yielding a knife, hell-bent on plunging it into you. Yet, I love those movies, and with Halloween right around the corner I get giddy with excitement thinking about some of the classic horror I’ll be watching soon – I’m not sure what that says about me. Who is scarier than Michael Myers? No one. The answer is no one. When I heard about Final Girls, a book marketed for fans of slasher films, I knew I would be picking it up as soon as it was released.

This is the story of the last women standing. After any slasher movie style bloody massacre, there is always a single woman who survives. Final Girls seeks to tell the story of three of these women, all who endured, and survived, the unthinkable. Sam, Lisa, and our narrator, Quincy, are bound by their similar experiences, though they all handle the other side of their trauma uniquely.

I liked this book, I really did! I found myself wrapped up in the lives of these women, and it’s an easy story to get lost in. This is a twisty book, but all fairly predictable. I called certain elements right away, though there was one pretty major reveal that I didn’t see coming. Much like many of the thriller / horror books that I have read lately, I didn’t find it scary. I don’t know if it was meant to be scary, but it was a really solid and enjoyable thriller. If you go into this book know that it is not a slasher book, it is a thriller about the women who a massacre.

A fun, engrossing read that fans of thrillers will be sure to enjoy.