2020 Book Check

I just finished reading a book that's been on my list for a while, Little Fires Everywhere. I'm sure many of you have heard it because it was on Reese Witherspoon's bookclub list and has been pretty buzzed about. The novel is about two families who live in a fancy Cleveland suburb called Shaker Heights. One family, the Richardsons, are wealthy and white and have lived there for generations while the other family, the Warrens, just moved to the area and are made up only of a single mother and teenage daughter. They are also renting a condo from the Richardsons. The families  intertwine throughout the book and their different lifestyles and backgrounds are frequently juxtaposed. The book does a really good job of bring motherhood, racism, and class into question. Since it was written by a Chinese-American woman who grew up in Shaker Heights herself, it was a really interesting peak into her world (kind of the opposite of American Dirt).
I really like reading Little Fires Everywhere but unlike Reese Witherspoon it didn't move me to tears. One thing that I appreciated the most about the book was that each character was really dynamic. Everything they did made sense given the explanation provided by a third person omniscient narrator. Today when we were talking about nonwhite characters often being portrayed as flawless, I was thinking about one of the characters from Little Fires Everywhere. She is a woman from China who moves to Cleveland and works in a Chinese restaurant with Ms. Warren. The character has a baby and leaves it at the fire station in the snow because she can't take care of her. A large part of the book takes place in a trial between this woman and the baby's eventual adoptive mother. The trial asks the reader to question if the baby's real mother would be more suite to raise her, even though she may not have the resources to do so, or should she be raised by her adoptive mother who is wealthy but really out of touch with Chinese culture. It's a really complicated situation and I liked how the author didn't tell the reader what to believe, though eventually I think most people would side with one of the women.
Okay sorry for that long plot summary.
Now I'm starting to read Between the World and Me which has consistently blown my mind. I really recommend it. The book is structured as a letter from the author to his son about what it means to be "black" in America and it kind of unpacks the concept of race in a really abstract way. I won't try to explain it, I'll just highly recommend!