Everything I Never Told You

Everything about this book is tragic – the main event, all of the relationships, all the things they never tell each other. Yet the story is so compelling. I was gripped, wanting to intervene and clear up misunderstandings between the characters and tell them all what they aren't seeing. It's such a strange feeling to enjoy a book so much that made me so sad.

I've rarely read anything that covered such personal topics that was as superficial and hollow as this novel. The only character who is even remotely believable as a real human being is the younger daughter, Hannah. Everyone else–from the robotic father James to the dissatisfied mother Marilyn, from the dead daughter Lydia to the invisible son Nath–is a cardboard cut out of a TV-movie cliche person. The book has no depth, no felt emotion, no events that even feel anything other than contrived for the purposes of making the reader feel this is a moving story. It isn't. It's a mish-mosh of adolescent angst, feminist frustration and second hand resentment of bigotry towards Chinese people in the US. The author was born three years after the latest event in the story, so everything about it is second hand, and feels it. I have her second novel, but I will not read it. This was a huge disappointment.

One sentence synopsis... A fresh spin on the familiar dead girl trope that has more in common with a family drama than a mystery thriller. .

Read it if you like... ‘Big Little Lies' or ‘Little Fires Everywhere'. It's part who-dunnit and part emotional (if somewhat heavy handed) character study. .

Dream casting... It's probably no surprise given the books it reminds me of but I thought Reese Witherspoon would be all over this. Turns out Julia Roberts already beat her to it and has been attached to the film adaption since 2018.

3.5/5 stars
Rounded down to 3 stars

The real magic of this book is the beautiful writing and the perspectives and relationships between the characters. I loved the repetition and connection to the title where you realize that family and relationships are complicated.
What are the things that we never tell the people around us? Are we struggling? Are we happy? Do we wish things were different? It definitely invites the reader to think about these things.

“Everything I Never Told You” unfolds beautifully. There are a lot of elements to this book that affect me in a personal way as a half-Asian person who grew up in the United States. The family dynamic is fascinating and somehow familiar. If I could give this more than five stars, I would. The word that comes to mind that sums up the whole book for me is “devastating”. While reading scenes within which my own feelings as teenager were clearly remembered and depicted, I felt actual pain. In my chest, in my eyes. There are casual lines throughout that hit me with the full weight of memory. Identity is the critical component of what propels this drama and, by the end of the book, I could only identify myself as a sobbing mess.

I'm still processing this one. I liked it, but it made me angry too. How the parents projected onto poor Lydia. How Lydia did everything her mother wanted so she wouldn't leave again. How desperate she was to keep Nath with her too.

I could understand if she wanted to commit suicide. She carried the weight of her family on her shoulders.

It was an interesting story of a family and how they did or did not relate to each other.

This book made me cry in the best way. I love the way each character's flaws build into the bigger picture of the family dynamic and I really loved each of the family members despite their mistakes. I thought it was a really beautiful look at grief and the way it breaks us down. Definitely recommend.

Early on, we see Lydia's room through her mother's eyes, and it's easy to think there are clues to Lydia's identity in what her mother observes. But, in a sense, everything in Lydia's room is an illusion filtered through the eyes of someone who fundamentally doesn't know her child. Only when the mother – Marilyn – looks closer does she really begin to see that the room is more Potemkin Village than anything else, signified by a row of empty diaries.

No one expresses their deepest fears and disappointments:

“If I'm not perfect, my parents might go away.”

“I've always felt different from everyone else, and so I can only love the things about my children that differ from me.”

“My life got sidetracked when I ended up following my mother's blueprint for my life, and so I must press my daughter to achieve her dreams, which are strangely the same as the ones I had for myself.”

“Why is the spotlight always on Lydia?”

The youngest child spends the whole novel observing and being able to do so because no one really interacts with her. She longs to reach out, to touch, to hug, but her family keeps moving out of her reach, either oblivious to her needs or irritated by them. She is hopefully destined to put her observational skills and empathy to good use.

It's under these conditions of lack of emotional honesty that tragedy happens.

The ending has a surprising amount of hope in it, which I'm not sure I buy, but because I've spent time with these people would hope is possible.

It happened so quickly that if she were a different person, Hannah might have wondered if she'd imagined it. No one else saw. Nath was still turned away; Lydia had her eyes shut now against the sun. But the moment flashed lightning-bright to Hannah. Years of yearning had made her sensitive, the way a starving dog twitches its nostrils at the faintest scent of food. She could not mistake it. She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn't care and went on anyway. It was too familiar to be surprising.

i dont even know what to say... celeste ng has cemented herself as one of my favorite authors now and im just in awe and enamored with the way she writes, the multilayered stories she weaves that are all dealt with equal amounts of care, the characters she constructs who are so human and so humanly flawed that i find parts of myself reflected back in all of them. i love this one even more than Little Fires Everywhere, this book feels like a part of me. very few books give me this feeling after i finish, like im walking on clouds... this is one of my favorites of the year for sure

This story is dark and complex. While seemingly centered around the death of the daughter (Lydia) of a Chinese-American family in the late 1970s, it's about so much more. You learn about the mother and father's upbringing and the baggage they bring to marriage and parenthood. Then there's the baggage of being Chinese-American in a predominantly white community. You spend time seeing through the eyes of Lydia's older brother Nath who can never quite garner the affection of his parents the way Lydia can. Lydia's younger sister Hannah sees and understands so much but is often forgotten and unnoticed. Readers also hear from Lydia who serves as the vicarious fulfillment for her parents' lost opportunities and unrealized dreams.

The family is dysfunctional, and uncomfortably so. Perhaps the discomfort comes from how relatable their dysfunction is. The Lee family is broken in ways I witnessed growing up and have experienced as an adult as well. They hide. They say the wrong things. They hold back from saying what they really want to or what they actually mean. They are selfish. They have regrets. Who isn't able to relate to this kind of brokenness?

Through flashbacks, foreshadowing, fast forwarding, shifting perspectives, and some questions left unanswered, Ng presents a fascinating exploration of family dynamics and grief.