Little Fires Everywhere takes place in the idealized town of Shaker Heights, a suburb outside of Cleveland, Ohio. It is a sort of utopia where the residents have chosen to seclude themselves from the perils of the outside world—Mrs. Richardson even says at one point that she "doesn't see color"—and the citizens prefer it to be this way.
However, when Mia and Pearl arrive, they evoke questions of what family, race, and stigma mean. The house which our main characters spend the most time in, the Richardson house, best encapsulates the emotions and feelings of the town on a small scale. While not as frequently visited in the book, the Warren house serves as a mirror image to the Richardson house, creating an intriguing juxtaposition to the town's ideals and values.
In the simplest sense, the setting of Celeste Ng’s novel is a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio called Shaker Heights.
On the outside, Shaker Heights is the picturesque epitome of American suburbia, with sprawling streets, friendly nieghbors, and upscale (albeit uniform) houses. The attraction of this glossy exterior is what draws working-class Pearl into the world of house parties and affluence.
However, there is more than meets the eye in Shaker Heights. The people in Shaker Heights are seemingly unaware of the privileges from which they benefit, including their whiteness and wealth. Despite the picture of perfection that Shaker Heights wants to project, it is instead a microcosm for the inequities of small town America—and the devastating effects that ignoring said differences can have.
Beyond this, the Richardson house is the primary location in which much of the novel’s action takes place. It’s an elegant, large home whose fragile serenity is disrupted after Elana Richardson invites Mia Warren to work as a housekeeper for the family.
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