“These people should have gotten some REAL problems.Once again, I find myself eagerly anticipating another Celeste Ng novel – luckily, I won’t have to wait for long! My favourite Amazon reviews of Everything I Never Told You: She was widely praised, by readers and critics alike, for her domestic psycho-drama and her depiction of the damage that parents can inflict on their children.īecause ultimately, that’s what this book is about: the weight of parental hopes and dreams, even (especially) the unspoken ones. Her hard work definitely paid off.įor her efforts, Ng won the Amazon Book Of The Year award of 2014, beating out the popular favourites Stephen King and Hilary Mantel. She has said that she spent six years working on Everything I Never Told You, writing four different drafts. In particular, I want to call out her pithy and apt descriptions (“a woman built like a sofa cushion”, and “a florid ham hock of a man”). Trigger warnings, naturally, for depression, suicide, infidelity, and racism.īut Ng’s writing shines, despite the darkness – she knows just how to drag a reader’s eyes down the page. It’s much darker than I remember Little Fires Everywhere being, with darker themes and content. These issues have new resonance with the spike in anti-Chinese sentiment in the States (and, I’m sorry to say, other parts of the world) after the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in late 2019.Įverything I Never Told You is a propulsive read, but not an easy one, if that makes sense. A lot of the tension stems from the fact that white regional Ohio was not a comfortable place to be for Chinese Americans in the ’70s, and mixed race families faced uphill battles on every front – internal and external. Race plays a major role in this family drama. It turns out, James and Marilyn Lee hadn’t done as good a job concealing their own struggles from their children as they’d thought. Their bright, popular, bubbly girl was in fact a ball of angst with few friends and slipping grades. As an investigation plays out in the background, they realise they didn’t know Lydia – or each other – as well as they thought. Lydia’s death forces everyone in the Lee family to reevaluate their lives, and reveals some hard home truths.

It’s in the blurb, it’s in the first sentence, and Lydia’s body has been found by the end of the first chapter. That sounds like a spoiler, but it isn’t.

Except that their middle child, Lydia, is dead… and they don’t know it, yet. The Lee family appears to be average in every way – working father, stay-at-home mother, three kids and a comfortable home in Ohio. (Everything you buy through one of these affiliate links will earn me a small commission – don’t say I never told you!)Įverything I Never Told You begins in 1977.

I never told you book