Everything I Never Told You

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   Everything I Never Told by Celeste Ng is about a Chinese-American family who lives in a small town in Ohio around the 1970s. Marilyn and James Lee have three children, but they favor Lydia above the others. James and Marilyn want Lydia to accomplish everything they were never able to. Marilyn wants her daughter to become a doctor to fight the male stigma and to accomplish her biggest dreams. James wants to do everything in his power to make her blend in, to make her feel less different.
   When Lydia winds up dead in the lake near their house, everything turns upside down. Secrets are exposed and people pinned themselves against each other. Marilyn finds that she didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought she did.
   Throughout the book, you start to realize that even though Lydia was a “perfect” daughter, she had secrets that she would never be able to tell her parents or her siblings. Her whole life she was trying to live up to her parents’ expectations, not even knowing what she wanted to do or who she wanted to be.
   This was a difficult book to read; I kept seeing myself in Lydia. Trying her best to live up to everyone’s expectations but always being pushed to do better than her best. This book is different than the other books in this blog, but different isn’t a bad thing. This has definitely become one of my favorite books. I found myself hypnotized by the words of Celeste Ng and didn’t want to put the book down. I look forward to reading her other book, Little Fires Everywhere.
“A deep, heartfelt portrait of a family.” —Alexander Chee, the New York Times Book Review

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