Little Fires Everywhere

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-20

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Quiz

Book Club Questions

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Character Analysis

Mia Wright

Mia is the young artist mother of a teenage daughter, Pearl. Mia and Pearl arrive in Shaker Heights after having spent the entirety of Pearl’s lifetime moving from place to place. Unlike the rest of the residents of Shaker Heights, Mia appears unconventional. Whereas residents have grown up and chosen to stay in Shaker Heights all their lives, Mia’s life has been mostly spent as a vagabond. Her nontraditional lifestyle is puzzling to the rest of Shaker Heights, especially to her landlady, Mrs. Richardson, who observes Mia as “a completely different kind of woman leading a completely different life, who seemed to make her own rules with no apologies” (69). This mystifies Mrs. Richardson in the beginning and then gradually leads to her resentment, as it opposes her attachment to Shaker Heights’ values of orderliness and social convention.

Mia is depicted as highly astute and worldly, acclimating well to her surroundings after having spent so many years on the road with meager resources. She is shown to repurpose objects and find value in commonly discarded items, which is also reflected through her attitude toward people. For instance, she is the only adult in Izzy Richardson’s life who earns the young girl’s trust. While others judge Izzy and are unwilling to listen to her, Mia’s gentle notice of her potential awakens something in the young girl. In much the same way that Mia can see the possibility in assorted objects, she also takes notice of those on the social fringes, offering “a small kindness” (75) to Izzy and intervening on behalf of her coworker, Bebe. Her involvement in both Izzy’s and Bebe’s lives show her investment in social justice. She gives Izzy the idea to prank the school after Mrs. Peters’s racist remarks and helps Bebe get her story onto local news channels when the McCulloughs refuse to let her see her child. In each of her interventions, she utilizes the same creative problem-solving skill she possesses in her art-making process to offer corrections to a social wrong.

Pearl Warren

Pearl, the only daughter of Mia, has spent all her life with her mother on the road. Born in San Francisco, she has no knowledge of the origins of her birth until Mia is forced to reveal that she is the legal child of Joseph and Madeleine Ryan, a wealthy couple from New York. While the revelation of her true origins is shocking to Pearl, she comes to a mature understanding of her circumstances and elects to stand by Mia despite the weight of this new knowledge. While the information is difficult to accept, she expresses her mother’s sense of resilience by quickly being able to conclude that she will meet her legal parents and grandparents one day when she is ready. She says to Mia, “‘Someday maybe we could go and see them together’” (309). In her offer, Pearl expresses a mindfulness of her mother’s well-being as well as her own, showing loyalty to Mia while drawing the possibility of healing together.

Throughout the novel, Pearl reaches this maturity gradually. Described at first as “quiet” (8) and dreamy, Pearl’s bookish self undergoes a transformation upon meeting the Richardsons. She molds herself after Lexie, the Richardsons’ confident and popular oldest daughter whom Pearl eventually realizes is just as lost as everyone else. She also has a sexual awakening when she pursues a romantic relationship with the Richardsons’ oldest son, Trip. In each of her experiences with the Richardsons, she learns a valuable lesson about the different ways in which one could move through the world. She learns that she must make choices along the way and that these decisions have consequences.

Elena Richardson

Mrs. Richardson was born and raised in Shaker Heights and has never left the town. Given that she has spent all her life in Shaker Heights, she has come to not only internalize its values of strict social order and convention but staunchly defends it at all cost. She is described as having been raised to follow rules all her life and to “believe that the proper functioning of the world depended upon her compliance” (69). She has fulfilled all the rules of Shaker Heights by staying in the town, raising a family in it, and working a standard job at the local newspaper. In many ways, she has “done everything right” and has “built a good life” (69). However, Mia’s arrival in Shaker Heights has forced her to insist upon these notions even more. Mia’s contrasting belief system, which permits more flexibility around social rules, threatens Mrs. Richardson’s sense of order. Rather than recognizing that her sense of order is precarious to begin with, she resents Mia instead.

By the end of the novel, Mrs. Richardson’s insistence on following social order is to her detriment. Her ruthless pursuit of Mia’s background story and blackmail of her finally pushes Izzy to take drastic action against her family. When Izzy sets her family’s home on fire and runs away, Mrs. Richardson finally realizes that all the careful planning and control she thought she had over her life does not mean anything in the end when one can lose their children anyway at any given moment.