What really sets Mia and Pearl apart and sets in motion the events leading to the “little fires everywhere” that will consume the Richardsons’ secure, stable world, however, is the way they hew to their own rules. Mia and Pearl live a markedly different life from the Richardsons, an affluent couple and their four high school–age children-making art instead of money (apart from what little they need to get by) rooted in each other rather than a particular place (packing up what fits in their battered VW and moving on when “the bug” hits) and assembling a hodgepodge home from creatively repurposed, scavenged castoffs and love rather than gathering around them the symbols of a successful life in the American suburbs (a big house, a large family, gleaming appliances, chic clothes, many cars). But unwelcome change is precisely what disrupts the Richardson family’s rather happy life, when Mia, a charismatic, somewhat mysterious artist, and her smart, shy 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, move to town and become tenants in a rental house Mrs. It’s not for nothing that Ng ( Everything I Never Told You, 2014) begins her second novel, about the events leading to the burning of the home of an outwardly perfect-seeming family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, circa 1997, with two epigraphs about the planned community itself-attesting to its ability to provide its residents with “protection forever against…unwelcome change” and “a rather happy life” in Utopia. Ng uses the complicated precedent set in the original case to delve deeper into themes of motherhood, ostracism, assimilation, and altruism.This incandescent portrait of suburbia and family, creativity, and consumerism burns bright. Mirabelle, or May Ling, just like Baby Jessica, is the object of tensions, debates, and moral grey areas, though as an infant she has no agency of her own.

Ng reverses the outcome of the Baby Jessica case-Bebe Wong is denied custody of her daughter-but complicates the already difficult moral debate by ending the novel with Bebe’s retaliation against the McCullough family, and her triumph over them. The story featured in the national media, with articles in People and Newsweek detailing both the DeBoer’s fight to keep the child they’d come to love as their own and the joy the Schmidt family-Jessica’s birth parents-felt at welcoming her home after a long legal battle.

In 1993, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Roberta DeBoer and her husband Jan were forced to return their adopted daughter Jessica, whom they had raised nearly from birth, to her adoptive parents in Iowa.

Author of little fires everywhere