4/2/2023 0 Comments Little fires everywhere castIf Ng had made Mia a woman of color, she could have delved further into that attitude through Elena. Shaker Heights residents take pride in the fact that their community was one of the first suburbs to racially integrate, for instance. Though the book works without that detail, it presents a missed opportunity to make the relationship between the families even knottier. The show focuses on race as one of the crucial contrasts between Elena (Reese Witherspoon) and Mia (Kerry Washington). The small-screen adaptation, which currently airs a new episode on Hulu every Wednesday, doesn’t just take the story from the page to the screen, but goes where Ng felt she couldn’t go on her own. “I thought of them as people of color, because I knew I wanted to talk about race and class, and those things are so intertwined in our country and in our culture … But I didn’t feel like I was the right person to try to bring a black woman’s experience to the page.” “Initially, I had wanted to write as people of color,” Ng, who’s Asian American, told me in February. Elena’s white, but the author never defined Mia’s ethnicity. Ng originally intended to make their differences even clearer. The privileged Elena will always see Mia as inferior, even if Elena refuses to admit it. To her, Mia’s lifestyle as an artist and a photographer seems exotic. Elena, who’s rich and intelligent and mannerly, understands success to mean a nuclear family. The author, Celeste Ng, posits that their conflict stems from the fact that the women are not meant to connect, because they are constrained by their circumstances. The story is not just about two women who don’t get along. Set in 1997, Little Fires is an audacious novel, hence the 48 weeks it spent on the New York Times’ hardcover-fiction best-seller list. Their relationships stir up a dangerous obsession among both families, revealing the story to be less a crime thriller and more a clever, moving examination of motherhood, female ambition, and sexual politics. But then the tale rewinds to the previous summer, and from there it becomes a study of two women-Elena Richardson, a wealthy mother of four, and Mia Warren, a nomadic single mom, who become inextricably linked. In the opening chapter, a house in a progressive neighborhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio, has burned down after someone set a series of fires inside its bedrooms-and no one knows why. A t first glance, the novel Little Fires Everywhere seems to be a suburban whodunit.
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