Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-31% $11.79$11.79
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$7.14$7.14
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: saveherenow
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Image Unavailable
Color:
-
-
-
- To view this video download Flash Player
Audible sample Sample
Everything I Never Told You Paperback – May 12, 2015
Purchase options and add-ons
So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.
A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
- Reading age5 years and up
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Lexile measure870L
- Dimensions5.05 x 0.53 x 7.76 inches
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateMay 12, 2015
- ISBN-100143127551
- ISBN-13978-0143127550
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
- He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.Highlighted by 5,405 Kindle readers
- You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.Highlighted by 4,259 Kindle readers
- Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.Highlighted by 4,104 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
Our Missing Hearts | Little Fires Everywhere | |
---|---|---|
Customer Reviews |
4.2 out of 5 stars
20,791
|
4.4 out of 5 stars
180,770
|
Price | $13.08$13.08 | $7.97$7.97 |
Other titles by Celeste Ng | A deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear. | Set in the placid, progressive suburb of Shaker Heights, Little Fires Everywhere traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. |
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family, Ng’s explosive debut chronicles the plight of Marilyn and James Lee after their favored daughter is found dead in a lake.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Excellent . . . an accomplished debut . . . heart-wrenching . . . Ng deftly pulls together the strands of this complex, multigenerational novel. Everything I Never Told You is an engaging work that casts a powerful light on the secrets that have kept an American family together—and that finally end up tearing it apart.” —Los Angeles Times
“Tender and merciless all at once . . . Vital in all the essential ways.” —Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing, A National Book Award winner
“Wonderfully moving . . . Emotionally precise . . . A beautifully crafted study of dysfunction and grief . . . [This book] will resonate with anyone who has ever had a family drama.” —Boston Globe
“A powerhouse of a debut novel, a literary mystery crafted out of shimmering prose and precise, painful observation about racial barriers, the burden of familial expectations, and the basic human thirst for belonging . . . Ng’s novel grips readers from page one with the hope of unraveling the mystery behind Lydia’s death—and boy does it deliver, on every front.” —Huffington Post
“A subtle meditation on gender, race and the weight of one generation’s unfulfilled ambitions upon the shoulders—and in the heads—of the next . . . Ng deftly and convincingly illustrates the degree to which some miscommunications can never quite be rectified.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Cleverly crafted, emotionally perceptive . . . Ng sensitively dramatizes issues of gender and race that lie at the heart of the story . . . Ng’s themes of assimilation are themselves deftly interlaced into a taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Ng moves gracefully back and forth in time, into the aftermath of the tragedy as well as the distant past, and into the consciousness of each member of the family, creating a series of mysteries and revelations that lead back to the original question: what happened to Lydia? . . . Ng is masterful in her use of the omniscient narrator, achieving both a historical distance and visceral intimacy with each character’s struggles and failures . . . On the surface, Ng’s storylines are nothing new. There is a mysterious death, a family pulled apart by misunderstanding and grief, a struggle to fit into the norms of society, yet in the weaving of these threads she creates a work of ambitious complexity. In the end, this novel movingly portrays the burden of difference at a time when difference had no cultural value . . . Compelling.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The mysterious circumstances of 16-year-old Lydia Lee’s tragic death have her loved ones wondering how, exactly, she spent her free time. This ghostly debut novel calls to mind The Lovely Bones.” —Marie Claire
“The first chapter of Celeste Ng’s debut novel is difficult—the oldest daughter in a family is dead—but what follows is a brilliantly written, surprisingly uplifting exploration of striving in the face of alienation and of the secrets we keep from others. This could be my favorite novel of the year.” —Chris Schluep, Parade
“The emotional core of Celeste Ng’s debut is what sets it apart. The different ways in which the Lee family handles Lydia’s death create internal friction, and most impressive is the way Ng handles racial politics. With a deft hand, she loads and unpacks the implications of being the only Chinese American family in a small town in Ohio.” —Kevin Nguyen, Grantland
“Beautiful and poignant . . . deftly drawn . . . . It’s hard to believe that this is a debut novel for Celeste Ng. She tackles the themes of family dynamics, gender and racial stereotyping, and the weight of expectations, all with insight made more powerful through understatement. She has an exact, sophisticated touch with her prose. The sentences are straightforward. She evokes emotions through devastatingly detailed observations.” —Cleveland Plain-Dealer
“Perceptive . . . a skillful and moving portrayal of a family in pain . . . It is to Ng’s credit that it is sometimes difficult for the reader to keep going; the pain and unhappiness is palpable. But it is true to the Lees, and Ng tells all.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Impressive . . . In its evocation of a time and place and society largely gone but hardly forgotten, Everything I Never Told You tells much that today’s reader should learn, ponder and appreciate.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2014 Celeste Ng
one
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. As always, next to her cereal bowl, her mother has placed a sharpened pencil and Lydia’s physics homework, six problems flagged with small ticks. Driving to work, Lydia’s father nudges the dial toward WXKP, Northwest Ohio’s Best News Source, vexed by the crackles of static. On the stairs, Lydia’s brother yawns, still twined in the tail end of his dream. And in her chair in the corner of the kitchen, Lydia’s sister hunches moon-eyed over her cornflakes, sucking them to pieces one by one, waiting for Lydia to appear. It’s she who says, at last, “Lydia’s taking a long time today.”
Upstairs, Marilyn opens her daughter’s door and sees the bed unslept in: neat hospital corners still pleated beneath the comforter, pillow still fluffed and convex. Nothing seems out of place. Mustard-colored corduroys tangled on the floor, a single rainbow-striped sock. A row of science fair ribbons on the wall, a postcard of Einstein. Lydia’s duffel bag crumpled on the floor of the closet. Lydia’s green bookbag slouched against her desk. Lydia’s bottle of Baby Soft atop the dresser, a sweet, powdery, loved-baby scent still in the air. But no Lydia.
Marilyn closes her eyes. Maybe, when she opens them, Lydia will be there, covers pulled over her head as usual, wisps of hair trailing from beneath. A grumpy lump bundled under the bedspread that she’d somehow missed before. I was in the bathroom, Mom. I went downstairs for some water. I was lying right here all the time. Of course, when she looks, nothing has changed. The closed curtains glow like a blank television screen.
Downstairs, she stops in the doorway of the kitchen, a hand on each side of the frame. Her silence says everything. “I’ll check outside,” she says at last. “Maybe for some reason—” She keeps her gaze trained on the floor as she heads for the front door, as if Lydia’s footprints might be crushed into the hall runner.
Nath says to Hannah, “She was in her room last night. I heard her radio playing. At eleven thirty.” He stops, remembering that he had not said goodnight.
“Can you be kidnapped if you’re sixteen?” Hannah asks. Nath prods at his bowl with a spoon. Cornflakes wilt and sink into clouded milk.
Their mother steps back into the kitchen, and for one glorious fraction of a second Nath sighs with relief: there she is, Lydia, safe and sound. It happens sometimes—their faces are so alike you’d see one in the corner of your eye and mistake her for the other: the same elfish chin and high cheekbones and left-cheek dimple, the same thin-shouldered build. Only the hair color is different, Lydia’s ink-black instead of their mother’s honey-blond. He and Hannah take after their father—once a woman stopped the two of them in the grocery store and asked, “Chinese?” and when they said yes, not wanting to get into halves and wholes, she’d nodded sagely. “I knew it,” she said. “By the eyes.” She’d tugged the corner of each eye outward with a fingertip. But Lydia, defying genetics, somehow has her mother’s blue eyes, and they know this is one more reason she is their mother’s favorite. And their father’s, too.
Then Lydia raises one hand to her brow and becomes his mother again.
“The car’s still here,” she says, but Nath had known it would be. Lydia can’t drive; she doesn’t even have a learner’s permit yet. Last week she’d surprised them all by failing the exam, and their father wouldn’t even let her sit in the driver’s seat without it. Nath stirs his cereal, which has turned to sludge at the bottom of his bowl. The clock in the front hall ticks, then strikes seven thirty. No one moves.
“Are we still going to school today?” Hannah asks.
Marilyn hesitates. Then she goes to her purse and takes out her keychain with a show of efficiency. “You’ve both missed the bus. Nath, take my car and drop Hannah off on your way.” Then: “Don’t worry. We’ll find out what’s going on.” She doesn’t look at either of them. Neither looks at her.
When the children have gone, she takes a mug from the cupboard, trying to keep her hands still. Long ago, when Lydia was a baby, Marilyn had once left her in the living room, playing on a quilt, and went into the kitchen for a cup of tea. She had been only eleven months old. Marilyn took the kettle off the stove and turned to find Lydia standing in the doorway. She had started and set her hand down on the hot burner. A red, spiral welt rose on her palm, and she touched it to her lips and looked at her daughter through watering eyes. Standing there, Lydia was strangely alert, as if she were taking in the kitchen for the first time. Marilyn didn’t think about missing those first steps, or how grown up her daughter had become. The thought that flashed through her mind wasn’t How did I miss it? but What else have you been hiding? Nath had pulled up and wobbled and tipped over and toddled right in front of her, but she didn’t remember Lydia even beginning to stand. Yet she seemed so steady on her bare feet, tiny fingers just peeking from the ruffled sleeve of her romper. Marilyn often had her back turned, opening the refrigerator or turning over the laundry. Lydia could have begun walking weeks ago, while she was bent over a pot, and she would not have known.
She had scooped Lydia up and smoothed her hair and told her how clever she was, how proud her father would be when he came home. But she’d felt as if she’d found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle, had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off. She kissed Lydia’s cheek and pulled her close, trying to warm herself against her daughter’s small body.
Now Marilyn sips tea and remembers that surprise.
The high school’s number is pinned to the corkboard beside the refrigerator, and Marilyn pulls the card down and dials, twisting the cord around her finger while the phone rings.
“Middlewood High,” the secretary says on the fourth ring. “This is Dottie.”
She recalls Dottie: a woman built like a sofa cushion, who still wore her fading red hair in a beehive. “Good morning,” she begins, and falters. “Is my daughter in class this morning?”
Dottie makes a polite cluck of impatience. “To whom am I speaking, please?”
It takes her a moment to remember her own name. “Marilyn. Marilyn Lee. My daughter is Lydia Lee. Tenth grade.”
“Let me look up her schedule. First period—” A pause. “Eleventh-grade physics?”
“Yes, that’s right. With Mr. Kelly.”
“I’ll have someone run down to that classroom and check.” There’s a thud as the secretary sets the receiver down on the desk.
Marilyn studies her mug, the pool of water it has made on the counter. A few years ago, a little girl had crawled into a storage shed and suffocated. After that the police department sent a flyer to every house: If your child is missing, look for him right away. Check washing machines and clothes dryers, automobile trunks, toolsheds, any places he might have crawled to hide. Call police immediately if your child cannot be found.
“Mrs. Lee?” the secretary says. “Your daughter was not in her first-period class. Are you calling to excuse her absence?”
Marilyn hangs up without replying. She replaces the phone number on the board, her damp fingers smudging the ink so that the digits blur as if in a strong wind, or underwater.
She checks every room, opening every closet. She peeks into the empty garage: nothing but an oil spot on the concrete and the faint, heady smell of gasoline. She’s not sure what she’s looking for: Incriminating footprints? A trail of breadcrumbs? When she was twelve, an older girl from her school had disappeared and turned up dead. Ginny Barron. She’d worn saddle shoes that Marilyn had desperately coveted. She’d gone to the store to buy cigarettes for her father, and two days later they found her body by the side of the road, halfway to Charlottesville, strangled and naked.
Now Marilyn’s mind begins to churn. The summer of Son of Sam has just begun—though the papers have only recently begun to call him by that name—and even in Ohio, headlines blare the latest shooting. In a few months, the police will catch David Berkowitz, and the country will focus again on other things: the death of Elvis, the new Atari, Fonzie soaring over a shark. At this moment, though, when dark-haired New Yorkers are buying blond wigs, the world seems to Marilyn a terrifying and random place. Things like that don’t happen here, she reminds herself. Not in Middlewood, which calls itself a city but is really just a tiny college town of three thousand, where driving an hour gets you only to Toledo, where a Saturday night out means the roller rink or the bowling alley or the drive-in, where even Middlewood Lake, at the center of town, is really just a glorified pond. (She is wrong about this last one: it is a thousand feet across, and it is deep.) Still, the small of her back prickles, like beetles marching down her spine.
Inside, Marilyn pulls back the shower curtain, rings screeching against rod, and stares at the white curve of the bathtub. She searches all the cabinets in the kitchen. She looks inside the pantry, the coat closet, the oven. Then she opens the refrigerator and peers inside. Olives. Milk. A pink foam package of chicken, a head of iceberg, a cluster of jade-colored grapes. She touches the cool glass of the peanut butter jar and closes the door, shaking her head. As if Lydia would somehow be inside.
Morning sun fills the house, creamy as lemon chiffon, lighting the insides of cupboards and empty closets and clean, bare floors. Marilyn looks down at her hands, empty too and almost aglow in the sunlight. She lifts the phone and dials her husband’s number.
For James, in his office, it is still just another Tuesday, and he clicks his pen against his teeth. A line of smudgy typing teeters slightly uphill: Serbia was one of the most powerful of the Baltic nations. He crosses out Baltic, writes Balkan, turns the page. Archduke France Ferdinand was assassinated by members of Black Ann. Franz, he thinks. Black Hand. Had these students ever opened their books? He pictures himself at the front of the lecture hall, pointer in hand, the map of Europe unfurled behind him. It’s an intro class, “America and the World Wars”; he doesn’t expect depth of knowledge or critical insight. Just a basic understanding of the facts, and one student who can spell Czechoslovakia correctly.
He closes the paper and writes the score on the front page—sixty-five out of one hundred—and circles it. Every year as summer approaches, the students shuffle and rustle; sparks of resentment sizzle up like flares, then sputter out against the windowless walls of the lecture hall. Their papers grow half hearted, paragraphs trailing off, sometimes midsentence, as if the students could not hold a thought that long. Was it a waste, he wonders. All the lecture notes he’s honed, all the color slides of MacArthur and Truman and the maps of Guadalcanal. Nothing more than funny names to giggle at, the whole course just one more requirement to check off the list before they graduated. What else could he expect from this place? He stacks the paper with the others and drops the pen on top. Through the window he can see the small green quad and three kids in blue jeans tossing a Frisbee.
When he was younger, still junior faculty, James was often mistaken for a student himself. That hasn’t happened in years. He’ll be forty-six next spring; he’s tenured, a few silver hairs now mixed in among the black. Sometimes, though, he’s still mistaken for other things. Once, a receptionist at the provost’s office thought he was a visiting diplomat from Japan and asked him about his flight from Tokyo. He enjoys the surprise on people’s faces when he tells them he’s a professor of American history. “Well, I am American,” he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone.
Someone knocks: his teaching assistant, Louisa, with a stack of papers.
“Professor Lee. I didn’t mean to bother you, but your door was open.” She sets the essays on his desk and pauses. “These weren’t very good.”
“No. My half weren’t either. I was hoping you had all the As in your stack.”
Louisa laughs. When he’d first seen her, in his graduate seminar last term, she’d surprised him. From the back she could have been his daughter: they had almost the same hair, hanging dark and glossy down to the shoulder blades, the same way of sitting with elbows pulled in close to the body. When she turned around, though, her face was completely her own, narrow where Lydia’s was wide, her eyes brown and steady. “Professor Lee?” she had said, holding out her hand. “I’m Louisa Chen.” Eighteen years at Middlewood College, he’d thought, and here was the first Oriental student he’d ever had. Without realizing it, he had found himself smiling.
Then, a week later, she came to his office. “Is that your family?” she’d asked, tilting the photo on his desk toward her. There was a pause as she studied it. Everyone did the same thing, and that was why he kept the photo on display. He watched her eyes move from his photographic face to his wife’s, then his children’s, then back again. “Oh,” she said after a moment, and he could tell she was trying to hide her confusion. “Your wife’s—not Chinese?”
It was what everyone said. But from her he had expected something different.
“No,” he said, and straightened the frame so that it faced her a little more squarely, a perfect forty-five degree angle to the front of the desk. “No, she isn’t.”
Still, at the end of the fall semester, he’d asked her to act as a grader for his undergraduate lecture. And in April, he’d asked her to be the teaching assistant for his summer course.
“I hope the summer students will be better,” Louisa says now. “A few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.”
“Well, this isn’t Harvard, that’s for sure,” James says. He pushes the two piles of essays into one and evens them, like a deck of cards, against the desktop. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s all a waste.”
“You can’t blame yourself if the students don’t try. And they’re not all so bad. A few got As.” Louisa blinks at him, her eyes suddenly serious. “Your life is not a waste.”
James had meant only the intro course, teaching these students who, year after year, didn’t care to learn even the basic timeline. She’s twenty-three, he thinks; she knows nothing about life, wasted or otherwise. But it’s a nice thing to hear.
“Stay still,” he says. “There’s something in your hair.” Her hair is cool and a little damp, not quite dry from her morning shower. Louisa holds quite still, her eyes open and fixed on his face. It’s not a flower petal, as he’d first thought. It’s a ladybug, and as he picks it out, it tiptoes, on threadlike yellow legs, to hang upside down from his fingernail.
“Damn things are everywhere this time of year,” says a voice from the doorway, and James looks up to see Stanley Hewitt leaning through. He doesn’t like Stan—a florid ham hock of a man who talks to him loudly and slowly, as if he’s hard of hearing, who makes stupid jokes that start George Washington, Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar . . .
“Did you want something, Stan?” James asks. He’s acutely conscious of his hand, index finger and thumb outstretched as if pointing a popgun at Louisa’s shoulder, and pulls it back.
“Just wanted to ask a question about the dean’s latest memo,” Stanley says, holding up a mimeographed sheet. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”
“I have to get going anyway,” Louisa says. “Have a nice morning, Professor Lee. I’ll see you tomorrow. You too, Professor Hewitt.” As she slides past Stanley into the hallway, James sees that she’s blushing, and his own face grows hot. When she is gone, Stanley seats himself on the corner of James’s desk.
“Good-looking girl,” he says. “She’ll be your assistant this summer too, no?”
“Yes.” James unfolds his hand as the ladybug moves onto his fingertip, walking the path of his fingerprint, around and around in whorls and loops. He wants to smash his fist into the middle of Stanley’s grin, to feel Stanley’s slightly crooked front tooth slice his knuckles. Instead he smashes the ladybug with his thumb. The shell snaps between his fingers, like a popcorn hull, and the insect crumbles to sulfur-colored powder. Stanley keeps running his finger along the spines of James’s books. Later James will long for the ignorant calm of this moment, for that last second when Stan’s leer was the worst problem on his mind. But for now, when the phone rings, he is so relieved at the interruption that at first he doesn’t hear the anxiety in Marilyn’s voice.
“James?” she says. “Could you come home?”
The police tell them lots of teenagers leave home with no warning. Lots of times, they say, the girls are mad at their parents and the parents don’t even know. Nath watches them circulate in his sister’s room. He expects talcum powder and feather dusters, sniffing dogs, magnifying glasses. Instead the policemen just look: at the posters thumbtacked above her desk, the shoes on the floor, the half-opened bookbag. Then the younger one places his palm on the rounded pink lid of Lydia’s perfume bottle, as if cupping a child’s head in his hand.
Most missing-girl cases, the older policeman tells them, resolve themselves within twenty-four hours. The girls come home by themselves.
“What does that mean?” Nath says. “Most? What does that mean?”
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (May 12, 2015)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143127551
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143127550
- Reading age : 5 years and up
- Lexile measure : 870L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.05 x 0.53 x 7.76 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,022 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #40 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
- #257 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #700 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the novels Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
BY: CELESTE NG
I first read, "Everything I Never Told You," when it was first published in 2014. I wanted to re-read it to see if it still was worthy of the five stars that I had rated it back then and it was. I have read "Little Fires Everywhere," and watched its miniseries produced by Hulu. In both novels Celeste Ng captures beautifully dysfunctional family dynamics. I loved both books and I would encourage you to watch the miniseries of "Little Fires Everywhere," because it is excellent and varies a little from the book. The acting is incredible. In both novels Celeste Ng explores how parents expectations of their children is the catalyst for a tragic outcome that they never expected. Also, in both novels that unexpected heartbreak is told to the reader in the very beginning. Since this is a review for "Everything I Never Told You," I will focus on that one.
The setting is during the 1970's which makes, "Everything I Never Told You," a historical novel, but I still think that the themes within that are so expertly explored are still relevant today. Celeste Ng crafted a realistic depiction of the discrimination that Asian Americans still face today. This novel in my humble opinion is even more heartbreaking because the beginning lines tell the story of every parents' worst nightmare. The title is pitch perfect for what ensues during flashbacks of how the Chinese American family of the Lee's ended up in the incredibly sad position that they now face.
It is not a spoiler to say that the beginning sentence tells that the middle child of three in this family is dead. The reason why I have included it in this review is because it is stated in the synopsis of this novel. Over the course of reading you will discover how this happened. Was it murder? By reading you will easily figure out what happened to Lydia. This one remains my favorite perhaps because of how it does a great job of the character development and the question of what if? You will not be disappointed in this deep dive of how it examines the cost of weighing what can result if you want a better life for your child and you pick a favorite child who you want to do and have all of the things that you didn't have. Is being the favorite more helpful or harmful to the child who you as a parent pin all of your hopes and dreams that you in your own life didn't achieve? If only? It is a question that will haunt you as you read this UNFORGETTABLE, but realistic story that centers on one family's struggles to reconcile one of life's toughest consequences. It did affect me just as powerfully as the first time I read it and I would rate it Five sparkling and bright stars and it is absolutely perfectly written. I wouldn't change a thing. Highly, Highly Recommended!
The Lydia in question is Lydia Lee, a teenager growing up in the Ohio suburbs of the late 1970s. A hybrid of her parents, with her Chinese father's black hair and her American mother's blue eyes, she has always stood out—particularly when all she wanted to do was fit in. Despite being the middle child, she is the one bearing all of her parents' expectations—her mother's desires that Lydia pursue the medical career she wasn't able to, and her father's wishes that she be popular, affable, and charming.
Lydia's death lays bare fissures between and among each remaining member of her family. Her parents' relationship wearies under the strain of grief, regrets, and the pressure of being an ethnically mixed couple in a world not quite ready to accept them. Lydia's older brother, Nath (short for Nathan), is desperate for his parents to recognize his achievements, yet they leave him to chart his own course, and he wonders if his attitude toward his sister in the last few days of her life had any impact on her death. And Hannah, the youngest daughter, all but forgotten in the haze, but she sees and notices more than anyone realizes, and is desperate to share her love and her thoughts with her family.
This is a sad book even without Lydia's death at its core. This is a book about all of the secrets, resentments, fears, hopes, regrets, and wishes we leave unsaid, and the toll they all take on our lives. It's amazing to realize how giving voice to one feeling, one irritation, one fear can truly change the course of a life, but all too often, they remain unspoken. It's also a book about the need to be the person you want to be, because if you allow someone else to mold you into something you don't want to be, you will lose yourself.
Everything I Never Told You is beautifully written and poignant, but because of all of the things left unspoken, it was a little frustrating at times, much like real life. The book spans through the early days of Lydia's parents' relationship to the aftermath of her death, and points to future events as well. All I kept thinking as I read the book was, "How sad." This is a tragic book, but not a maudlin one, and Celeste Ng's writing is poetically lyrical.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Mexico on January 28, 2022
Depuis insight. Brilliant.
Schreibstil: bildhaft – verschiedene Perspektiven und Zeitformen
Meine Meinung: Die Story ist vielschichtig, berührend und gefühlvoll, ohne pathetisch zu sein. Erzählt aus den Perspektiven der einzelnen Familienmitglieder, inkl. der verstorbenen Lydia, taucht der Leser in die jeweilige Gefühlswelt ein und entwickelt Verständnis für die Figuren sowie ein tiefes Mitgefühl für Lydia, die zur Projektionsfläche der unerfüllten Wünsche ihrer Eltern wird. Der Vater James, mit chinesischen Wurzeln, wünscht sich für seine Kinder nichts sehnlicher als soziale Integration. Die Mutter Marilyn, aus der ethnischen Mehrheit, möchte verhindern, dass Lydia wie sie in einem Leben als Hausfrau (ver)endet. Dabei fragte niemand nach Lydias Lebensträumen. Hinzu kommen die Probleme einer Familie, die aus verschiedenen ethnischen Wurzeln erwächst. Denn auch wenn alle in der Familie so tun, als wäre dieses Anderssein normal und kein Problem, spricht das gesellschaftliche Umfeld eine komplett andere Sprache.
Gefangen zwischen elterlichen Wünschen und gesellschaftlicher Ablehnung bleibt vieles unausgesprochen und nur der Leser erfährt von Lydia, was sie nicht erzählte.
Fazit: Ein eindringliches Familienporträt und tiefsinniges Sittengemälde der amerikanischen Gesellschaft
Eine Empfehlung für Leser mit einer Vorliebe für Familien- und Entwicklungsromane