Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng: book review

Everything I Never Told You (2014) is set in Ohio, America, in 1977. Specifically, it is set in the Lee family home – with mother Marilyn, 45-year-old father James (an American history professor), and their children Nath, Lydia, and Hannah.

The Lee family is not the ‘usual’ Middlewood family – they are probably the only American-Chinese in the whole town, even though they were all born in America. When Marilyn (American) and James (of Chinese heritage, born in California) wed in 1958 their wedding – their mixed race marriage – would would been illegal in half of the states across America.

It is Tuesday, 3 May 1977, and Lydia Lee is 16 years old, but she does not appear for breakfast. On Wednesday a passerby noticed a rowboat adrift on the lake. On Thursday morning police drag the lake and find her body. The newspaper announced: Oriental Girl Found Drowned in Pond.

Nath thinks Jack Wolff – a senior at the same school as Lydia – was involved. Her mother thinks Lydia’s bedroom holds the answer. Perhaps her school bag too.

Did Lydia sneak out at night? Was she going to meet someone? In the rowboat … on the lake? Officer Fiske finds no evidence of anyone in the boat with her. So did she die by her own hand?

Lydia had fallen into the lake years before, and her mother had disappeared too years before. For a couple of months. But they both came back to the family. But yes, there were problems within it. Lydia was a loner – ‘friendless’ – happy to apply herself to science, and attending science summer school. Her mother thought she was a genius, but recently Lydia’s grades were rapidly declining. The only person she told was Jack.

Then everything someone never told anyone, everything someone had kept bottled up, comes pouring out of their mouth – was it Nath, Jack, James … Marilyn, Hannah ... Lydia? But this person is not the only one with secrets – and gradually the family’s secrets are exposed.

The nicely-written mystery slowly develops in a quiet, gentle, unobtrusive manner, until the weight of knowing sinks you slowly under.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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