This book was received to great acclaim. It was a New York Times bestseller, Amazon’s best fiction book of 2017 and according to the author’s webpage, it was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications. For me, it didn’t live up to the hype. It was an enjoyable enough read – in fact, I stayed up past midnight to finish it – but to me it felt like a spiky Jodi Picoult, crammed full of moral dilemmas and bookgroup discussions and rather heavy-handed and judgmental.
The book is set in Shaker Heights, a liberal, planned neighbourhood with strict controls over house colours, gardens etc. In fact, the author lived in this real-life neighbourhood, and her cynicism about the hypocrisy underlying this seemingly-idyllic middle-class enclave permeates the book. Even though there is this rather snide, unsubtle critique of liberalism and its intersection with class and race, the real theme is motherhood, explored through issues of abortion, adoption, surrogacy and teenage pregnancy. The story focuses on three families: Bill and Elena Richardson and their four children Lexie, Trip, Moody and Izzy; their tenants in a nearby duplex Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl; and Mark and Linda McCulloch who, after many years spent trying to have a baby, have finally adopted an abandoned Chinese-American baby.
The book opens with the Richardson’s house catching fire, a clear-cut case of arson with “little fires” lit everywhere. The family is quite sure that the fires were lit by the youngest daughter Izzy, who is missing after a family argument. It’s certainly not a who-dun-it, because the perpetrator has been identified by the end of the first page, but more a why-dun-it.
Elena Richardson as a mother is rigid and judgmental, masked by a self-serving public charity that keeps strict account of services rendered and owed. Despite an American “mom” persona, she has never warmed to her youngest daughter Izzy whom she finds difficult. She works part-time as a local journalist, which gives her rather far-fetched access to information which she uses gratuitously and oblivious to the damage she is doing. Although she would dispute it, she is quite unaware of the lives of her children, who are drawn to a very different type of mothering displayed by their tenant, Mia Warren.
Mia is an artist, who has lived in many places with her daughter Pearl. They live simply, with few possessions, and when they shift into the Richardson’s rental property, inherited from Elena’s mother, Mia agrees to work as a housekeeper for the Richardsons, as well as taking shifts in a local Chinese restaurant. She is different, and Izzy and later Lexie, are drawn to her quietly subversive, attentive mothering. The book moves away from the Richardsons in giving Mia’s back-story, which explains her nomadic lifestyle and her relationship with Pearl.
Finally, the whole of Shaker Heights is happy when Mark and Linda McCulloch adopt Mirabelle, their Chinese-American baby, until the baby’s mother emerges, demanding the return of May Ling Chow. The dispute inevitably finds its way to the courts, where the questions of ‘best interests of the child’ and connection with culture are raised. Linda McCulloch does herself no favours with her ethno-centric, blinkered views of “culture”.
There are lots of hot-button topics here, especially for women (fathers are very much side-lined in this book). So many, in fact, that I felt as if they were being stuffed in for discussion value with an eye to the female, liberal, book-group target market which the author courts and yet despises. The book is written well enough, although it felt like three different books as the author moved her attention from one family to the other. Her use of the “little fires” metaphor was rather heavy handed: it starts with a fire, the baby is abandoned at a fire-station, Mia talks about a cleansing burn as a way of clearing the past. Heavy handed, too, was her critique of the hypocrisy of Elena Richardson and Linda McCulloch, which made them almost caricatures of entitlement and heedlessness.
It was certainly a page-turner, and as intended, it sparked a good bookgroup discussion. But ‘book of the year’ it ain’t, for me anyway.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from: CAE bookgroups
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 