Everything I Never Told You- Book Review
A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing. A sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
An intricate novel about the importance of speaking up, of being true to yourself and of how or past can shape us but ultimately we have the power of choice.
There's so much to untangle that I don't even know how to put it into words.
The writing style of this book was exquisite. The descriptions of the town, Lydia's bedroom, the house are enrapturing. I could write and essay about they way Celest Ng describes smells.
This is one of those books that makes you wanna stop and savor the deliciousness of sentences and words. Makes you wanna think about what you just read.
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet" So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio.
This novel begins with the dead of a beloved child, when the parents first realise she's gone they think she's missing and so it begins the quest to find out who their child really was only to discover she kept secrets.
Living as a Chinese family in the 70s in America was hard to read about, the racism the father and his children encountered just because they looked different was sad to witness more-so through the eyes of the father himself and how his experience shaped the way he raised the kids, specially Lydia, and his relationship with his son, Nath, his wife, Marilyn, suffered because of the hatred society taught him.
Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfil the dreams they were unable to pursue.
Getting to know Lydia through the eyes of her siblings and her parents hit deep, but later on in the novel getting to know Lydia and the burden she carried destroyed me.
Sometimes parents don't realise the amount of pressure they put on their children, the way Celeste was able to convey the suffocating atmosphere Lydia lived in, how she was pulled tighter and tighter until she snapped, was painful to witness but at the same time I admire the skill it requires.
More over, being able to experience the parents backgrounds, how they were raised, how society shaped them and labeled them made you understand them and feel for them because no one taught them how to be parents, no one taught them how to raise children, how to get rid of their own expectations and frustrated dreams, how to let children lead their own lives. Parents often want what's best for their children, they don't want them missing opportunities or making the same mistakes they made but in trying to protect the children they harm them, they leave a mark, a scar, that can't be erased.
As a woman, watching Marilyn make her choices and regretting some of them, trying to do her best with what she was taught by her own mother and then realising she missed out on so many things, trying to make amends with her dreams and going after them, the sacrifice it took of her to see for herself when already having a family, struck a chord, I saw my own mother, my grandmother, thinking their dreams are long gone, that it's too late when in reality it isn't. Witnessing how her own desperation cracked her relationship with one daughter and was inexistent with the other reminded me that often we are so blinded by our own desires we fail to see the whole picture until it's too late or sometimes, just in time.
Overall this book taught me a lot, about forgiving not only others but also ourselves. Because we are flawed and we are all trying to do the best we can with the life we've been given. It taught me compassion, a reminder that we all carry our past but there's strength when we don't let it define us.
"Where did it go? The mattress, the photographs, the emptied-out bookshelves? The same place people went when they died, where everything went: on, away, out of your life."
"How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers."
"Looking up at the sky, she felt as if she were floating in space, completely untethered. She could not believe that anything was impossible."
