Little Fires Everywhere

 Little Fires Everywhere 

By Celeste Ng

It doesn't take long for the literal version of the titular fires to make an appearance: They are right there in the first pages. So the reader knows right away that a train wreck  -- train fire? -- of some sort is coming. Discerning who it involves and why is what keeps the reader going and on edge throughout the book. In the end, no one escapes a blaze. 

Tellingly, the book is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, which, Ng takes great pains to explain, is the first planned community in the nation. Elena Richardson, the matriarch of a wealthy Shaker Heights family, loves this fact, and incorporates the ethos of the town into her daily life. Which, by all appearances, is going pretty darn well. Enter her opposite: Mia Warren, an artist whose life is unplanned to the extreme. She has spent her life wandering the US with her daughter, staying in communities only long enough to complete a project before packing up and moving on. It is the classic "A stranger comes to town" trope. And Mia and her daughter Pearl's appearance leave no Richardson life unscorched. Can the same be said of Mia and Pearl? Perhaps that's the real question.

At the heart of this novel is the best way to live a life, something that I think a lot of us have had too much time to ponder in this pandemic. On the one hand there is Elena, who finds safety and comfort in having her path set and accumulating the trappings of "success". She reminds me of the Puritans, who believed in predestination, which one would think would make the accumulation of wealth a moot point, God already deciding whether you were going to get into heaven and everything, but who wanted more assurance than that and so sought out wealth as a sign of divine favoritism. And then, of course, there is Elena's commitment and connection to her community. Mia, on the other hand, lives her life solely based on her own values and escapes connection at all cost. Interestingly, this seems to allow her to see people more clearly -- except, maybe, her daughter, who ultimately can't decide for herself how she would like to live the way Mia can.

Obviously, our choices aren't so dichotomous in real life. But what is real is that, no matter what path we choose, we are certain to encounter our share of fires.

Magpie Murders

 Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I've been searching for a book to get lost in for a while, and thought that a murder mystery might do the

trick. Can't say I was wrong. This one started conventionally enough. It tells the tale of an unexpected death in a small English town, Saxby-on-Avon, that soon attracts the attention of a renowned sleuth named Atticus Pund. Set in the years after World War II, it reads much like the many British murder shows my parents like to watch. And with good reason: Horowitz is the creator of a couple of them (Midsommer Murders included). 

All of this hits the spot -- but just as you are enraptured in the mystery there comes a twist! The book is actually a red herring -- or is it? The actual murder involves the author of the book, and it falls to his editor to solve the crime. Very meta.

For what it is worth, I actually picked the eventual murderer, which I won't reveal in the off chance that someone who might want to read the book finds themselves on this post. But suffice it to say that it wasn't someone under suspicion and therefore seemed like an obvious choice. 

No profundity from this book, but it was certainly fun to read. And it felt like two books in one by the end.