Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

What parent, with the best of intentions, has not attempted to set his or her child on the path to happiness and success in life. What parent has not then consciously or unconsciously pushed that child in a direction that will lead to the fulfillment of the parent's lost dream, not the child's dream at all. Everything I Never Told You gives us a portrait of such a family, where this universal behavior is carried to the extreme, with tragic consequences.

Here both the mother and father focus their attentions on the oldest daughter, Lydia, inexplicably virtually ignoring two other children. The mother wants Lydia to become a doctor, because her own medical school plans were interrupted by unplanned pregnancy; the father just wants Lydia to be popular, because he has never fit in socially. Because she wants her parents to be happy, poor Lydia feigns an interest in science and math to please her mother and pretends that she has many friends to please her father, while slowly realizing that she will never be able to meet her parents' expectations. Then the fragile structure of the family is shattered by Lydia's death by drowning.

This novel is sometimes almost unbearably depressing as the reader sees how oblivious the parents are to reality. Unfortunately, the author's attempt to salvage a tentatively happy ending is entirely unconvincing, particularly the mother's sudden epiphany and change in behavior. In real life, people do not alter life-long patterns so quickly and easily.

I was never entirely sure how the author intended the subtext of the parents' differing racial heritage (a Caucasian-American mother and an Asian-American father) to figure into the narrative. I don't believe she was pointing a finger at society for rejecting the Asian-American father, but was, instead, indicating the sense of otherness and alienation felt by a member of a minority group, regardless of the reactions of those around them.

This is a page-turner novel, a one-day or two-day read. The characters themselves seem very real, even when their actions seem illogical. It is emotional and instructive in equal measure, warning as it does of the perils of lack of communication and understanding within a family.