Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You (2014)
By Celeste Ng

There's a missing teenager, a nearby lake, a dodgy-looking boyfriend and a dysfunctional family with secrets - sounds like a fairly simple murder mystery, right? But Everything I Never Told You was Amazon's Best Book of 2014 for good reason and it's much more than you might initially
expect.

For starters, the mystery of the missing girl (lost? kidnapped? imprisoned? murdered?) is resolved pretty quickly - in fact, it's never really a mystery at all. The very first paragraph of the book reads "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast".

Missing girl Lydia Lee is her parents' favourite child - intelligent, ambitious and popular, she seems the least likely of teenagers to disappear. As we learn more about Lydia and her family though, the events of that May morning begin to make a bit more sense. The Lees are a bit of a novelty in 1970's small-town Ohio - mother Marilyn is blonde and beautiful, with crushed dreams of a career in medicine; father James is American-born Chinese, a history professor who specialises in the particularly American institution of Cowboys. Lydia's older brother and younger sister have both been relegated to minor roles in the family as their parents pour all of their hopes and dreams into blue-eyed Lydia. For her mother, she is a hard-working, focused scientist with an assured future at medical school. For her father, she is young, vivacious and popular, surrounded by giggling blonde American friends. In reality though, Lydia may not be any of these things at all. After her daughter's disappearance, Marilyn snoops through Lydia's diary to find clues, only to find that every single page is blank.

Everything I Never Told You is a book full of secrets, mysteries and misunderstandings. First and foremost is the mystery of Lydia's disappearance, but there are also secrets between Marilyn and James, the unexplained disappearance (and then re-appearance) of Marilyn from the family a few years earlier, the reason for the complete absence of grandparents from the children's lives, older brother Nathan's secretive ambitions and younger sister Hannah's secret stash of stolen objects. The narrative moves back and forward in time through the 1960s and 1970s, following various members of the family and adding layer upon layer of complexity to the characters and the relationships between them. Running beneath it all is an undercurrent of racism and misunderstanding - there are no other mixed-race families around and it's a time and place where it's still perfectly acceptable to refer to the Lee family as "Orientals". Following Lydia's disappearance, the local newspaper runs a story headed "Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place" and it seems to be widespread opinion that her disappearance is due to her unfortunate ethnic background.

America - not always particularly accepting of the "Orientals"

It's a beautifully-constructed portrait of a unique family, with characters so well-written and complex that they feel completely real. There are elements of suspense in Everything I Never Told You, as the story builds to the final revelation of exactly what happened to Lydia - but there's so much more to the book than that. Ultimately, all of the character development along the way means that you feel very strongly about and for the Lee family, so that ultimately the final twist has much more impact than it might otherwise have done. It is fantastically well done, and Amazon may well be right in choosing this as the Best Book of 2014; it would be hard to pick a better one.

10/10