Everything I never told you

297 pages

English language

Published Jan. 4, 2014

ISBN:
978-1-59420-571-2
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
862149050

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (34 reviews)

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another" -- Provided by publisher.

11 editions

An interesting story to mull over

4 stars

Dave bought Everything I Never Told You for his Kindle months ago so I get to also read it thanks to Amazon's Family Sharing policy which is a great idea. We can use the campsite's wifi at our current CS so I seized the opportunity to download most of the books he has bought that I have not yet read!

Everything I Never Told You is marketed, on its cover at least, as being similar to The Lovely Bones and I think that does this book a disservice. Yes, both are set in the 1970s and the catalyst for both storylines is the death of a girl, but that could apply to dozens of books. Everything I Never Told You is an exploration of family relationships and tensions in a biracial household where two generations of wanting the best for their children has spectacularly backfired.

Marilyn, a white American woman, …

Review of 'Everything I never told you' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I flew through this! Very readable, but definitely leans literary in terms of the prose and the themes (Asian American experience, gender, generational trauma). My main reason for 4 stars instead of 5 stars was that it felt melodramatic at times. The language surrounding a scene would amp up the intensity so much. I imagine if it were a movie it might be a little overacted and the music really pushing certain emotions on you. I prefer my stories more restrained than that.

I want to call this more a family drama than a thriller, but it has thriller or mystery elements given the death of Lydia (first sentence, not a spoiler). I haven’t read many books like that, but Shelter by Jung Yun comes to mind. I would also compare the structure of this book to Crossroads by Franzen because we are focused on this family and we learn …

A story of Grief and rebuilding

3 stars

Content warning Abuse, Neglect, Depression, Death, Racism (of course).

Review of 'Everything I never told you' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

They will think of her often: .... When, a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses it deep down in his core. So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.

Oh good heavens, this book is intense. Gut-wrenchingly sad in bits, the book provides a window into the life and history of a family, with the loss of a loved one as the premise. Ng creates a delicately crafted window to peer into their lives, and how each one of them makes sense of it, and how they deal with it. It's a study in loss, grief, and the scars we bear. Age-old scars that become fault-lines, fault-lines that haunt you, stay with you, …

Review of 'Everything I never told you' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

This book opens with the discovery that a teenage girl is missing, and soon you find out that she's dead. Then it turns to the story of how her parents met, and how the family grew over time, shaping her, and how her family mourns her. I couldn't put it down

The story ends in the 1970s, so I would have assumed that racism they encounter is worse than you'd experience today, but I saw Celeste Ng at an event a few days ago, and she said that every slight she describes happened to her or someone she knows.

Ng was asked if Lydia's death was a suicide. Her answer was that when she was writing it, she knew what she thought happened, but the book belongs to the reader. Some people interpret it one any, others another, and that's the book they read.

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Subjects

  • Grief
  • Drowning
  • Death
  • FICTION / Literary
  • Daughters
  • Fiction