Study Guide for Book Clubs: Little Fires Everywhere: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #31

By Kathryn Cope

Whether you are a member of a book club, or simply reading Little Fires Everywhere for pleasure, this clear and concise guide, written by a specialist in literature, will greatly enhance your reading experience.

A comprehensive guide to Celeste Ng's acclaimed new novel Little Fires Everywhere, this discussion aid includes a wealth of information and resources: useful literary context; an author biography; a plot synopsis; analyses of themes & imagery; character analysis; twenty thought-provoking discussion questions; recommended further reading and even a quick quiz. For those in book clubs, this useful companion guide takes the hard work out of preparing for meetings and guarantees productive discussion. For solo readers, it encourages a deeper examination of a multi-layered text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kathryn Cope
• Release date: Feb 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386285298

Kathryn Cope

Kathryn Cope graduated in English Literature from Manchester University and obtained her master’s degree in contemporary fiction from the University of York. She is the author of Study Guides for Book Clubs and the HarperCollins Offical Book Club Guide series. She lives in the Staffordshire Moorlands with her husband, son and dog.

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Introduction

There are few things more rewarding than getting together with a group of like-minded people and discussing a good book. Book club meetings, at their best, are vibrant, passionate affairs. Each member will bring along a different perspective and ideally there will be heated debate.

A surprising number of book club members, however, report that their meetings have been a disappointment. Even though their group loved the particular book they were discussing, they could think of astonishingly little to say about it. Failing to find interesting discussion angles for a book is the single most common reason for book group discussions to fall flat. Most book groups only meet once a month and a lackluster meeting is frustrating for everyone.

Study Guides for Book Clubs were born out of a passion for reading groups. Packed with information, they take the hard work out of preparing for a meeting and ensure that your book group discussions never run dry. How you choose to use the guides is entirely up to you. The author biography, context, and style sections provide useful background information which may be interesting to share with your group at the beginning of your meeting. The all-important list of discussion questions, which will probably form the core of your meeting, can be found towards the end of this guide. To support your responses to the discussion questions, you may find it helpful to refer to the ‘Themes & Symbolism’ and ‘Character’ sections.

A detailed plot synopsis is provided as an aide-memoire if you need to recap on the finer points of the plot. There is also a quick quiz - a fun way to test your knowledge and bring your discussion to a close. Finally, if this was a book that you particularly enjoyed, the guide concludes with a list of books similar in style or subject matter.

Be warned, this guide contains spoilers. Please do not be tempted to read it before you have read the original novel as plot surprises will be well and truly ruined.

Kathryn Cope, 2018

Celeste Ng

For anyone unsure of how to pronounce Celeste Ng’s name, her Twitter account provides a heavy hint: @pronounced_ing. The Asian American writer was born in 1980 into a family of high-achieving scientists (her father was a NASA physicist and her mother a chemist). Her parents originated from Hong Kong and moved to the Midwest of the USA in the late 1960s.

Celeste spent her early years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she was the only Asian student in her school. In 1990, she moved with her family to Shaker Heights, Ohio and lived there until leaving for Harvard University to study English. She then earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan (winning the Hopwood Award in the process). Her essays and short stories also appeared in a number of publications.

Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, was published in 2014. Set in the 1970s in a small American college town it begins with the death of Lydia Lee, a Chinese American teenager, whose body is found in a lake. Responsible and hard-working Lydia was one of the last girls anyone would expect to get into trouble. The circumstances surrounding her death, however, raise questions over whether this can be a straightforward case of accidental drowning. Ng takes the mystery of Lydia’s death and uses it to slowly peel away the facade of a Chinese American family apparently living the American Dream. Along the way, she delivers an intricate portrait of family dynamics and a powerful exploration of conflicted Asian American identity.

Everything I Never Told You was voted Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014 and won the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the Medici Book Club Prize, bringing Ng widespread recognition as a hot new literary talent. Her much-anticipated follow-up novel, Little Fires Everywhere, has been received with equal enthusiasm. To date, the novel has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, has been named Amazon’s best novel of 2017, and has won the Goodreads Readers’ Choice award 2017.

Ng is married and has a son. She is also a regular contributor to Twitter. After the election of Donald Trump, she launched the hashtag #smallacts appealing for people to perform small acts of generosity or kindness as an antidote to intolerance. 

www.celesteng.com

Plot Synopsis

The novel is set in the 1990s in the picturesque garden city of Shaker Heights, Ohio. It begins with Elena Richardson standing outside in her bathrobe as she watches her family’s six-bedroom home burn down. The previous evening Mrs. Richardson watched from her window as her tenants, Mia and Pearl Warren dropped their house keys in her mailbox and left town. Mrs. Richardson’s youngest daughter, Izzy, has disappeared and is believed to be responsible for the fire. The connection between these events is yet to be explained.

The narrative goes back to almost a year before the fire. Mia Warren, a 36-year-old artist, and her daughter, Pearl, have just moved to a rented duplex in Shaker Heights owned by Elena Richardson. She and her daughter have lived in many places, never settling for long. In order for Mia to pursue her art, she manages to