Recent Reviews
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
I enjoyed Celeste Ng’s second novel Little Fires Everywhere. The drama blasts open when Izzy Richardson, the youngest of Elena and Duncan Richardson’s four children, sets their family home on fire. The novel then retraces the events preceding the fire. Ng digs into the inner lives of Elena Richardson and her children to show us that families that look “put together” from the outside can actually be unhealthy and dysfunctional, while families that look atypical can be healthy and functional. Such irony would not please Elena Richardson who marries her college sweetheart, has four children and, in a concession to motherhood, writes fluffy personal interest stories rather than investigative journalism pieces for the local paper. Like her mother and grandmother, Elena was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a planned and rule-bound community founded by the Shakers at the turn of the century. She remains in Shaker Heights and relishes in the knowledge and security that derive from her lineage.
When she rents her rental property to a peripatetic artist named Mia and Mia's high school daughter, Pearl, the Richardson family is permanently altered. Pearl becomes enthralled with three of Elena’s teenagers while the fourth child, Izzy, spends her time helping Mia with her art projects. Izzy feels understood and appreciated when she is with Mia, and Pearl is enamored of the bustling Richardson home.
When Mia helps a destitute co-worker who drops her infant off at the fire station, it is a catalytic moment in the narrative. Elena Richardson’s best friend, Linda McCullough, has adopted the young infant. A custody battle ensues, with Mia helping the young co-worker get her baby back while Elena and her husband fight for the adoptive parents. “So it was her tenant, her quiet little eager-to-please tenant, who had started all of this. Who had, for reasons still unclear, decided to upend the poor McCulloughs’ lives.” Elena Richardson feels that Mia has betrayed her. She turns to her investigative journalism skills to track down Mia’s past. Like a detective, she visits Mia’s estranged parents and learns about events that led to Pearl’s birth and Pearl's unnamed father. (I like where Celeste Ng was taking her readers, but I needed more signals to convince me that Elena would pursue Mia’s past with such intensity.)
There are a couple of clues that Elena is jealous of Izzy’s relationship with Mia. Izzy’s birth had been difficult and frightening. Elena says, “She had learned with Izzy’s birth how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course. Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn’t know how to unclench.” Elena’s fear reveals itself as anger when a situation involves Izzy. Does she still resent Izzy for wreaking havoc on Elena’s orderly world when Izzy was a child? The other kids model Elena’s behavior and make Izzy feel like an outcast.
Like a perfect storm, events culminate and coalesce and lead to Elena’s eviction of Mia and Pearl. For Izzy, these events are the fuse that lights the fire.
I admire Ng’s effort to explore the emotions of all her characters. She understands the complicated feelings, inner turmoil, and unique needs of her characters. Little Fires Everywhere is an excellent examination of intricate family dynamics.
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Based on the real life scandal at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, Lisa Wingate’s heartbreaking novel is told from two different points of view. First we learn the traumatic story of the five Foss siblings who are taken from their shanty boat on the Mississippi River in 1939 and placed in the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. The children’s mother and father leave to go to the hospital where their mother gives birth. Illiterate and under sedation, their mom unknowingly signs paperwork relinquishing her beloved children to the state.
When the Foss siblings first arrive at the orphanage in shock, the oldest Rill assures them that their parents’ will arrive soon to retrieve them. Yet it soon becomes clear that they are in a nightmare from which they cannot escape. Rill does everything she can to protect her younger siblings but soon her youngest brother Gabion is adopted and the four siblings never see him again. The tragedies continue to mount. The Foss siblings learn that they are all viewed as poor river rats. In time, Georgia Tann changes the children’s names and invents for each of them an impressive pedigree. It is hard to read about children being treated as nonhuman commodities by cruel adults who convince themselves that children are better off with wealthy parents than poor parents.
The other perspective of the story takes place in the present and follows Avery Stafford, a granddaughter of one of the Foss siblings. While Rill Foss’ story moves forward, Avery looks to the past to discover the hidden history of an elderly woman who is mysteriously connected to Avery’s grandmother.
Wingate captures the horror perpetuated by Georgia Tann and her enablers. Between 1939-1950, thousands of children were placed in Tann’s orphanages. Most of the children were neglected, abused, and traumatized by being ripped from their birth families. In 1951, there was a newspaper article “Adoption Matron May Have Been Most Prolific Serial Killer.” This horror show happened due to the greed and prejudice of George Tann and those she paid off. Even when the public became aware that children were stolen and treated cruelly, the Tennessee courts sealed the adoption records until 1995! Too many people must have been complicit and/or benefitted from one of Georgia Tann’s adoptions.
Though the present day part of the story is not as strong, it is a relief from the abuse. Avery Stafford does succeed in discovering her grandmother’s hidden past and connecting these two elderly Foss women. Though these women have lived happy and privileged lives far away from the river, their traumatic early years still dominate their emotional lives. The memories of their forced adoptions reside close to the surface. How could they not?
Though I wish Wingate had explored Georgia Tann’s early life and motivations for her disturbed view of the world, I believe her novel tells an important story of greed, collusion, and the systemic oppression of poor people. By creating characters with whom we can empathize, Wingate makes real the horrible events that occurred. She is both illuminating a sad story from the past and reminding her readers that powerful people can and will collude to advance their own immoral interests at the expense of those less powerful. Before We Were Yours is not an easy read and yet by the end of the book I felt buoyed by the resilience of the human sprit.
Little Nothing by Marisa Silver
When the wonderful leader of my disability book group selected Little Nothing by Marisa Silver, I expected to read about the trials and tribulations of a young girl born a dwarf. Yet after the first few chapters, it became clear that Silver’s ambitions were bolder and more complex. What begins as a simple fairy tale evolves into a dark and disturbing meditation on identity. Marissa Silver’s evocative and powerful prose captured me from the first page and didn’t let me go until the last.
The story begins in some unknown country (the Czech Republic?), in some unknown time (the 20th century?). A girl is born to an elderly couple and they name her Pavla. Certain attributes about the infant are different. Since Pavla’s mother sought advice from the local witch doctor, she blames herself for her daughter’s differences and pays her infant little attention. Pavla’s father delights in Pavla from the beginning and Pavla senses it. “…..Pavla feels, for the first time in her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love.”
When she fails to grow, Pavla’s parents, who have come to love her completely, are now overwrought with fear. In their minds, Pavla’s very survival depends on her becoming a “normal” girl even though she is intelligent, insightful, and industrious. They consult a doctor in the village who advises them to pursue horrific remedies. “Neither can bear to form the words that will make a lie of what they’ve said all her life: that they love her just the way she is and that she never needs to change.” Pavla endures these horrors that include a machine built to stretch her. “Pavla wonders who they are, these people she loves, who she believed would protect her.”
I think a psychologist might say that Pavla has a dissociative experience. In order to endure these remedies, she separates her mind from her body. She transforms from a dwarf to a wolf girl to a wolf and finally to a prisoner who resembles Pavla. And instead of doubt and disbelief at this turn of events, I believe Pavla’s iterations. Though we experience Pavla in different forms, her soul, her spirit, and her essence remain consistent. And the only person that recognizes her in these different forms is Danilo, the boy who loves her but cannot commit to her.
Silver’s ambitious book comes at an important time in our history. Women’s stories must be told and believed. Silver also seeks to repudiate the healers of every generation who act on their own prejudices and fears. She also reminds us that it is often women who perpetuate the fables that denigrate, hurt, and punish other women, even those they love.
Silver’s book is an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual meditation on the often-fractured lives of women. The novel is raw and primal, and it strikes at the core of what it means to be a young woman whose identity and destiny are determined by others. Little Nothing is as much an experience as it is a novel.
