Well. This certainly wasn’t the most uplifting book, was it? Buy that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good one. And it’s definitely one that’s going to stay with me for a very long time. It’s going to make me think about some of the parenting choices that ive made over the past 12 years, and make me wonder about some of the decisions my own parents made when I was growing up. And it’s going to make me teach my son to make his own damn […]
A Study of Grief and Dysfunction
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. At first glance, Everything I Never Told You looks like a classic thriller. There’s a missing girl, a family with secrets, a lake, and a bad boy who knows more than he’s willing to say. It’s easy to think it’s a familiar story about catching a killer. That’s the first curve ball author Celeste Ng throws at you, but not the last. It turns out discovering who killed Lydia (and did anyone actually kill Lydia?) is […]
A Well Written Family Drama
So for my first non-romance review of the year I completely overcorrected and went the extreme and depressing family drama route. Huzzah! It was just slightly less depressing than it first appeared so I’m taking it as a win. Everything I Never Told You is the story of the Lee family. On the first page you find out that their beloved middle child has died. What unfolds is both the backstory of how this came about, but at the same time what is occurring […]
You Know What They Say About Unhappy Families
It’s not every debut novelist that can turn out a book that’s so masterful, so haunting, and so beautiful as Everything I Never Told You is. There’s a very good reason Amazon named it the best book of 2014. In fiction, I don’t always gravitate towards these kinds of books. It’s more of a cerebral, slow-burn of a novel. There’s not a lot of action that takes place over the few hundred pages, no big bombshells dropped that leave you gasping and turning furiously to the […]