Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

by Celeste Ng

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Winner of the Alex Award and the Massachusetts Book Award • Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Grantland Booklist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, School Library Journal, Bustle, and Time Our New York

The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts

“A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

“Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” 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.

• ISBN10: 0143127551
• ISBN13: 9780143127550
• Publish Date: 12 May 2015 (first published 26 June 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Penguin USA
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 336
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780143127550

Reviews

[nannah]

Oh, I don’t read many mysteries, but I’m glad I picked this one up. It’s a very beautiful, thoughtful, and sad story about a tragic event causing a family to unravel and then come back together.

Content warnings:
- suicide

Representation:
- the main family (who are all POV characters) is biracial; the father is Chinese-American, and the children are Chinese and white.
- a secondary character is a gay/bisexual man, but this gets very little page time

The Lees are a mixed Chinese-American family living in Ohio in the 1970s. Their daughter, Lydia, the favorite and burdened with her parents’ dreams, has just shown up dead in the lake in front of their house. Without Lydia, the family seems to fall apart. And as the family piece together more behind her death, it’s clear none of them truly knew Lydia at all.

I have never read a book that captures someone falling out of love as realistically and perfectly as this one. This occurs both between the parents and between the parents and children. It’s unnerving how well Celeste Ng understands the minds of each of the characters and knows how they’ll react to every event.

I really don’t have much to say other than it’s a masterfully done story (though I should’ve counted how many times someone mashed their mushy cereal to nothing with their spoon. It had to be at least six or seven times). I'll be looking at what else Celeste Ng has written right after I post this review ...

[Bianca]

‪2019 Popsugar Reading Challenge‬
37. A ‪book about a family‬

That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved.

— A beautiful & quietly devastating story of a family who are strangers to one another, of how the things we don’t say could drown us whole, and of how we all just long to belong & to be loved

[luddite]

They will think of her often: .... When, a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses it deep down in his core. So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.

Oh good heavens, this book is intense.

Gut-wrenchingly sad in bits, the book provides a window into the life and history of a family, with the loss of a loved one as the premise. Ng creates a delicately crafted window to peer into their lives, and how each one of them makes sense of it, and how they deal with it. It's a study in loss, grief, and the scars we bear. Age-old scars that become fault-lines, fault-lines that haunt you, stay with you, colour your perception of reality and your interactions with those around you, and threaten to define you.

Ng does a wonderful job of exploring the fears and wants of her characters, all embedded within the strange and remarkable dynamic of a family. I absolutely love her prose and how she switches perspectives almost seamlessly.

This book will stay with me. For a long, long time.

[Whitney @ First Impressions Reviews]

Review:

I purchased Everything I Never Told You on a whim. When I walked into Barnes & Nobel I only had eyes for Little Fires Everywhere.   However, I am usually hesitant to splurge on a hardcover by an author I've never read before.  Therefore, I reached for Celeste Ng's début novel.

The plot of Everything I Never Told You is very reminiscent of The Lovely Bones. Both books center around the death of a teenage girl which leaves their family grappling with their new reality. Like Sebold's novel, Ng has created a whodunit of sorts.  The reader is left wading through havoc with the hopes of discovering what happened the night Lydia died.

Overall, I liked the pacing. I think the author gives her readers a good overview of the pressure Lydia was under. Even though the main plot point is Lydia's death I think the idea of how far a child would go to please their parents is also an interesting one.

Even though I read the novel in almost one sitting Everything I Never Told You was not without its faults. At the beginning of the novel, Lydia's father James is introduced to a student who would become his teacher's assistant. I had a very bad feeling on how it would end i.e. falling into bed together. Sadly, my prediction was correct. I was disappointed by this as it did nothing to further the story and felt that James' despair could have taken another direction.

Secondly, I found the ending to be a little anticlimactic. With all the build-up surrounding Lydia's death, it felt fragmented and unfinished. Perhaps that is what the author was going for as Lydia's life was also left unfinished.  However, I found it a tad disappointing for an otherwise enthralling book.

Overall, Everything I Never Told You is definitely worth the read and is an excellent first novel by Celeste Ng.

This review was originally posted on First Impressions Reviews

[clementine]

I found this book very quietly powerful. The portrait of a mixed race family, the exploration of what it's like to be visibly different in a small Midwestern town in the 60s and 70s, the loss of dreams under patriarchy... there are a lot of very big themes here which I think Ng absolutely did justice.

The characters are all so well-drawn and complete - they are flawed, they make big, hurtful mistakes, but they are so human that I couldn't help but truly feel for them. Unsurprisingly, I thought Marilyn was the most interesting character. To see such an intelligent, tenacious woman who wanted nothing more than to be a doctor reduced to the role of a housewife, and for her to try so hard to live vicariously through her daughter that she did not see how disastrous that pressure could become... it's heartbreaking. Actually, the most heartbreaking aspect of the novel is how singular all of these characters were in their pain, when if they'd just possessed the means to communicate they could have processed their traumas together. The breakdown in communication between James and Marilyn is painful, the loss of their daughter further splintering a relationship that has already been fractured by an inability to fundamentally understand each other. I can see why Ng chose to set the novel in the late 70s - because the racial difference between James and Marilyn would have been all the more pronounced then, and because Marilyn's stagnant lot in life is very much of that time.

I really dislike the trope of young female characters dying to further the development of other characters, so I was very heartened that Lydia was well-developed. Of course, the novel focuses a lot on the psychological workings of her family after her death, but she is not an afterthought or a convenient vehicle. She is a fully-developed character too, her death a tragic convergence of her family's dysfunction.

The entire novel felt stifling, and that's because all of its characters are stifled. Marilyn's ambitions find no outlet; James is not seen as a person but as a representation of his race; Lydia is a beacon of her parents' hopes and unrealized dreams, to the exclusion of her own desires; Nath and Hannah are largely ignored in favour of their sister. All of these characters have unrealized potential, and it seems that it's too late for the parents and Lydia. There is some hope, in the end, for Nath and Hannah, but it's still quite a bleak novel. Not bleak for the sake of being bleak, though, I don't think. Just lovely, all in all.

[layawaydragon]

I listened to an audio copy borrowed from my local e-library.

I was immediately hooked in and loved pretty much everything about it. Delving into all the history, little details, and the descriptions won't be for everyone though.

[readingwithwrin]

Wasn't sure what to expect with this one. I liked the real meaning behind this book (or at least what I think the real meaning behind it was). Full review coming soon.

[lex6819]

Very well written. I actually finished the book (and I don't finish most novels, there are so many bad ones out there). Compelling, and somewhat suspenseful. Reminded me a little of "Deep End of the Ocean." Difficult to sympathize with the characters. Cheesy middle class problems was a stumbling block for enjoyment.

[Leah]

Maybe it's just me but I am sick to death of books that end without actually telling you anything. Or leaving it so out there you have to be as clever as Sheldon Cooper to get it (and I'm not even sure Sheldon would get it).

I really, really loved the writing for Everything I Never Told You, it was really, really good. So exquisite, the kind of writing that flows so poetically, and I liked the story of how the death of Lydia made the whole Lee family implode, but what absolutely bugged the life out of me is the simple fact that I still don't feel like I know what happened to Lydia.

I think I am done reading these so called "literary" books. I like that the books I do read have a proper, finite ending. Because I like proper and finite endings, and not the ending I had here. I felt like I'd read 300 pages and not learned a single thing! :(