Everything I Never Told You

English language

Published April 30, 2014

ISBN:
978-0-349-13428-4
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4 stars (2 reviews)

Everything I Never Told You is the 2014 debut novel by Celeste Ng. The novel topped Amazon's Best Books of the Year list for 2014. The novel is about a mixed-race Chinese-American family whose middle daughter Lydia is found drowned in a nearby lake. Ng spent six years writing the novel, going through four different full drafts.

4 editions

Review of 'Everything I Never Told You' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A short summary would be "the better Lovely Bones" - a slow analysis of family dynamics sparked by the death of a teenager. While here a lot of things are done better which I found tedious in Lovely Bones and welcomed that there is a novel dealing with the struggles of second generation immigration I still could not really warm up with the writing style. Every sentence is hammered into perfection with a clear purpose and the core message (do not shape your children after your expectations) repeated so often that it somehow numbed me. I don't even know if you can even criticise a novel for being be too carefully crafted, but that's how it felt to me.

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4 stars