Little Fires Everywhere

The novel feels like it was engineered for book club discussions - with topics from adoption, whether a white family should be raising a Chinese American child, infertility, abortion, child custody, poverty, insular rich suburban life... The setting is in the 90s in a suburban Cleveland neighborhood, but it also feels outdated, like I'm reading a book that I've read before, twenty years ago. Nothing really surprising happens, the characters are either boring or unlikable.

The second that the adopted baby controversy was introduced I lost all interest. Mainly because I thought it was unrealistic for Bebe to have any legal claim to her child. She was neglectful to the point of abuse, and then abandoned her child at a fire station. Every state has safe haven laws, which have provisions to handle if a birth parent wants to regain custody later. In most cases “You also have the right to be informed by safe haven staff that by surrendering the child, you are releasing the child for adoption and that you have the right to petition the court in your state (within a set time period, like 28 days) to regain custody.” In that case, she would have had no legal grounds, and a large part of the book was unnecessary. The court scenes where the lawyer asks the adopted parents how they were going to raise the baby with Chinese culture was cringe worthy.

I did enjoy the descriptions of photography and Mia's artistic eccentricities. However, there is a bizarre paragraph mentions how she was the only freshman who didn't blush at nude life drawing because she helped her mother, an RN, with patients at the hospital. Just - what? It would be wildly inappropriate for a nurse to bring a child to work, much less to have an untrained person assist with patients in any way - much less see them in the nude.