Little Fires Everywhere (by Celeste Ng)

Absolutely wonderful. Marvelously written, expertly paced and plotted, with delicious characters.  I loved how the framing story of Mirabelle / May Ling almost seemed to comment on the other plotlines. I loved the narrative style, an omniscient narrator who towards the end of the novel starts to hint at the distant future.  I also loved the ambiguities of the ending, the descriptions of Mia's artwork, the character of Izzy and her fraught relationship with her mother, the exploration of adolescence...

And, especially being an adoptee, I really resonated with the stories of these two families and their secrets, as well as the meditations on motherhood and daughterhood throughout the novel.  Here's just one quote that hit me right in the solar plexus: 

To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place.

One of my favorite reads of the year, no doubt.