Order and Control
The story takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a planned community governed by rules as intrusive into personal expression as the allowed height of lawns and the exterior colors of homes. Everything about Shaker Heights has been planned to attain and maintain the appearance of order and order is simply another word for “normalcy.” That which is out of order is also out of sync with what is normal. This devotion to order and normalcy masquerades a more sinister intent: control of what is deemed to be normal and what is not. The obsession of Shaker Heights as an idea becomes concrete in the narrative focus of the story in the form of a child custody battle between the Chinese biological mother of a child and the white family trying to adopt her.
Raging Against the Machine
It is only natural that not everybody raised in a community obsessed with imposing its own standards of order and normalcy would quiescently accept it. Such a situation is bound to produce two extreme effects: those who support it without question and those who reject it wholeheartedly. This latter response—rebellious rejection of everything the Shaker Heights stands for—is embodied in the figure of Izzy, the youngest of the Richardson children. It is she who is immediately fingered, in large part because she has skipped town, at the novel’s beginning for having set “little fires everywhere” which have left her family “nothing but the clothes on their backs." From there, the story flashes back to tell how things arrived at this state, inexorably making its way back to the beginning where the books ends with Izzy’s mother declaring she will spend the rest of her life looking for her runaway rebel if that is what it takes to achieve reconciliation.
Mothers and Daughters
Upon this foundation of order and disorder and the idea being normal or raging against normalcy is constructed a thematic examination of the relationship between mothers and daughters. The courtroom struggle for parent custody between Bebe Chow and Linda McCullough which pits biological claims against the perception of “best interests” plays out not just as a legal battle, but a morality play over what constitutes a “good mother.” Izzy’s mom is one of those Shaker Heights residents who has completely bought into the innate superiority of instituting order as the key to a planning future success. Izzy, however, is merely the daughter who most embodies the concept of rebelling against her hometown as a philosophical expression; Mrs. Richardson soon finds her careful planning and attention to order disrupted by unplanned activity on the part of first-born daughter, Lexie. And then, of course, there is the more uniquely idiosyncratic—for Shaker Heights—relationship between the latter-day counterparts of Hester Prynne and her daughter: Mia and Pearl Warren.
