Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. At first glance, Everything I Never Told You looks like a classic thriller. There’s a missing girl, a family with secrets, a lake, and a bad boy who knows more than he’s willing to say. It’s easy to think it’s a familiar story about catching a killer. That’s the first curve ball author Celeste Ng throws at you, but not the last. It turns out discovering who killed Lydia (and did anyone actually kill Lydia?) is […]
A Well Written Family Drama
So for my first non-romance review of the year I completely overcorrected and went the extreme and depressing family drama route. Huzzah! It was just slightly less depressing than it first appeared so I’m taking it as a win. Everything I Never Told You is the story of the Lee family. On the first page you find out that their beloved middle child has died. What unfolds is both the backstory of how this came about, but at the same time what is occurring […]
You Know What They Say About Unhappy Families
It’s not every debut novelist that can turn out a book that’s so masterful, so haunting, and so beautiful as Everything I Never Told You is. There’s a very good reason Amazon named it the best book of 2014. In fiction, I don’t always gravitate towards these kinds of books. It’s more of a cerebral, slow-burn of a novel. There’s not a lot of action that takes place over the few hundred pages, no big bombshells dropped that leave you gasping and turning furiously to the […]
How did everything get so fucked up?
Wow, WOW, W O W. This book definitely lived up to the hype and punched me right in the heart with its awesomeness. Celeste Ng combines tight and thrilling storytelling with a beautifully lyrical writing style. The way she shifts from character to character and past to present seamlessly is beyond remarkable. I can’t believe this is a debut novel. It’s the kind of story that seems effortless when you’re reading it, but in hindsight you can see just how complicated it must have been […]
Blend In or Stand Out?
Everything I Never Told You is a novel about thwarted dreams, love, and parental expectations; about race in America in the 1970s, women’s rights, the desire to fit in and the desire to stand out. And the mysterious death of 16-year-old Lydia Lee. Was it suicide or foul play? The story begins with Lydia’s death. Her body has been found in the lake, and since it is known she couldn’t swim, foul play is assumed. Our initial image of Lydia is as a genius with […]