The Book vs The TV Show: Little Fires Everywhere
Whether you loved or hated the TV adaption, I feel you.
Celeste Ng first enticed me with her novel “Everything I Never Told You”, and after enjoying the book but wanting more, I reached for the notoriously dramatic “Little Fires Everywhere”. It’s important to note for this review that I read the book before watching the TV show.
Major differences: in the book, Mia was completely different. She was soft spoken and secretive, and certainly not prone to the dramatic and long-winded outburst that Kerry Washington displayed consistently in her adaptation of the role. A lot of the climatic confrontation that happen in the TV show don’t occur in the book, which is what gives Celeste Ng her signature style. The same occurence is the focal point of her previous novel Everything I Never Told You. Celeste Ng leaves reader wanting, begging, for things to be said out loud and to each other, and she tortures and intrigues us by never letting that happen. The TV show, of course due to the nature of what TV is, built on confrontations, as well as several major personality changes that not only fundamentally shift our understanding of the characters, but shift the entire meaning of the book.
A major theme of the book is people who believe themselves to be allies, or good people, reveal themselves to be only performative. The major concept is changed drastically by the one book-TV discrepancy: calling the police on Mia and Pearl sleeping in the parking lot. This scene that does not exist in the book was added to be one of the first scenes in the movie, and this casual act of cruelty immediately tells us who Elena Richardson is as a person. However, in the book we are introduced to her through her feelings on continuing to rent out the second house at an absurdly inexpensive price. In doing this, she clears her conscious of the feeling she can’t shake: that her inherited wealth and whiteness has afforded her a privilege that not many others have found. We learn through her actions when angry, as we do with Moody as well, that true colors always come out, and they aren’t pretty.