They both pin their hopes and dreams on Lydia, the fifteen-year-old, blue-eyed, black-haired anomaly of the family. Meanwhile, Marilyn, desperate to not follow in the ponderously old-fashioned footsteps of her mother, wrenches so hard against convention that she winds up falling back on the same path. The family orbiting around Everything I Never Told You is the Lees: father James, scholar and son of Chinese immigrants mother Marilyn, an intensely bright mind stifled by the confines of housewifery overlooked oldest child Nath socially awkward favored middle child Lydia and observant youngest daughter Hannah, a child so invisible to her own loved ones, she might as well be a seam in the drywall.įor James, the desire for acceptance, to be treated as anything other than other in his predominantly white community, has been a lifelong struggle. Packed with secrets, lies, and the intolerable weight of expectations, the gorgeously rendered writing of Everything examines the everyday imposter syndrome that plagues parents, both as professionals and people, and their “perfect” children.

But the whodunit at the center of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You plays a much-lower-key second fiddle to the twists and turns of mixed-race familial relationships, as they evolve-or refuse to-over the decades. Rare is a murder mystery that’s less gripping than a psychodrama about a middle-class family.

Everything i never told you book review