Everything I Never Told You

Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. New York: Penguin. 2014. Print.

First Sentences:

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.

Description:

Grim, powerful first lines are exactly the kind that force you to continue reading. And Celeste Ng's novel Everything I Never Told You does not disappoint on any page. 

It is a sad story set in a small college town during the mid-1970s, a story of one family's tragic loss of their teenage daughter Lydia who they discover has drowned in a nearby lake. But why did this happen? Who caused her death? Could it have been avoided? And what does her loss do to each member of her family?

Underlying this simple tale are the swirling currents of race discrimination, alienation, parenting, loneliness, spoiled relationships, and individual coping strategies when dreams blossom and die. 

Lydia, along with her older brother Nath and younger sister Hannah, are children of James, a Chinese father who is a history professor at a small college, and Marilyn, who is white, a housewife, and once was James' student. Wracked by guilt and sadness over Lydia's death, all four family members look for answers from each other and outsiders like the police and Jack, the unsupervised trouble-making teen living across the street. 

Jack smelled as if he had just been out in the woods, leafy and green. He smelled the way velvet felt, something you wanted to run your hands over and then press to your face.

With chapters narrated by different characters, individual past histories including Lydia's are slowly uncovered. Each person is full of secrets and surprises that show these people to be a very ordinary family but made up of individuals who are unique in both good and troubled ways.

Marilyn smiled back, a fake smile, the same one she had given to her mother all those years. You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears. You kept your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.

I won't spoil the details of the exploration of this family's inner workings and the unraveling of details around the death of Lydia. Suffice to say, it is not a thriller-style book about roving murderers and violence. Rather it is a riveting, highly personal novel of one family's interaction as a group and as individuals during their formative years in a difficult social environment. Their dreams, their losses, and their coping mechanisms for dealing with feelings of loneliness, frustration, and isolation are powerfully portrayed by Ng's spare writing, with plenty of secrets and twists up to the very last pages.

Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Ogawa, Yoko. The Housekeeper and the Professor

The very quiet, personal narrative of a Japanese woman who becomes the housekeeper for a retired professor of mathematics. Their relationship and gradual unfolding of their inner strengths and lives is satisfying on every level. (previously reviewed here)

See, Lisa. China Dolls

Story of three young Chinese girls during the 1938 World's Fair in San Francisco, trying to make a living, enjoy their new friends, and preserve their individual identities in this very foreign world. (previously reviewed here)