Everything I Never Told You is the tale of a Chinese-American family in a time when diversity was tolerated at best. Set in the 1970’s the Lees, a family of five, struggle to understand each other. They also struggle to fit into a world that doesn’t understand them. The father, James, is of Chinese heritage, while his wife, Marilyn, is white. Their three children stand out as Chinese in an all-white school.

Ng uses this novel to explore, among other things, the pressures with which parents weigh their children down, not even knowing they are doing so. Ng writes, “How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.”

The book is a literary thriller of the “whodunnit” variety, but while the mystery propels us, Ng structures the story so we shift between the family’s theories and Lydia’s own story, and what led to her disappearance  and death, moving toward the final, devastating conclusion.

All the shifting causes us to appreciate that each member of the family has his or her own issues with either “belonging” or “fitting in,” issues that will resonate with all humans, no matter the ethnicity or gender. At heart, the novel is about the price we pay and the payments we exact from others as social beings.

• Many thanks to Paula for providing this link to Ng’s interview with GoodReads where we can find out what literature Ng prefers and how she finds it: https://www.bookbub.com/blog/long-story-short-with-celeste-ng-interview