Is it possible to write about a book you’ve read and didn’t viscerally respond to without discouraging that book’s other potential readers? Is it possible to recognize a book’s many qualities and still say that your experience reading it wasn’t exactly satisfying? I am going to try and do this with Celeste Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere, a book that has been highly praised, both online and in newspapers and has managed also to be a bestseller and seems to be a favorite of many people.
Ng is a fine writer. She tells a compelling story, and at the center of Little Fires Everywhere is a provocative moral dilemma. This novel—her second— is, for these reasons, impressive.
I recently visited the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland’s County Clare—a mecca that attracts tourists from all over the world. The cliffs rise precipitously above the Atlantic, and when you stand at the top of them, you look down on a short grassy decent that quickly ends at a sharp shelf. And then a sheer 700-foot drop to The Atlantic. The view is dramatic and the cliffs appear monolithic. And yet despite the fact that the Slieve League Cliffs in Donegal are three times higher, the Cliffs of Moher are far more frequently visited.