Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

This story is set in the US in the Clinton era, among the ordered, wealthy lives of Shaker Heights, a planned community on the edge of Cleveland, Ohio. The central family is the Richardson's, Mum & Dad, Trip, Lexie, Moody and Izzy. Like all the other families of Shaker Heights, their lives are lived by rules and routine. Mum is a journalist and Dad a lawyer, and the children are programmed to follow middle class aspirations of good school, prestigious college, high-salaried job, marriage, children etc etc. Disturbing the even tenor of their ways is the youngest daughter Izzy, who doesn't quite fit, will not conform, and with her Dr Martin boots, loud music and slammed doors, is a continual source of irritation to her mother. Then Mia, unmarried mother, photographer and rule-breaker moves into the area with her intelligent daughter Pearl, and Mrs Richardson's carefully ordered world is shaken to its core.

Mia does not take photographs, she makes art, with total absorption and passion. She challenges the values of the onlookers, forcing them to see the world through different eyes, and Celeste Ng uses this as the main metaphor in the book.

Mrs Richardson in contrast, with her fixed, conventional worldview, "had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control... Rules exist for a reason: if you followed them you would succeed; if you didn't, you might burn the world to the ground".

Behind the order and convention of Shaker Heights, with the crisp lawns and immaculate houses, the lives of the people were not pretty pictures but were complex and messy. Values and ideas that can deal with mess and chaos are the ones that win out over those that rely on rules and order.

The story starts with a fire and then goes back to trace the many threads that led up to it. At the end we come full circle and a final set of photographs that reveal how Mia saw the Richardson family more clearly than they saw themselves.