Just Finished Reading Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You is Celeste Ng's first novel, and it won all kinds of acclaim after it came out in 2014.  I had already read her 2017 book Little Fires Everywhere...read my article about it by clicking HERE.  With this first effort of Ng's, the focus is on an American family living in the Midwest in 1977: the mother Marilyn, the father James, and their three children Nathan, Lydia and Hannah.  Ng clearly delineates the often diametrically opposed perspectives of each of these members, their love for one another and the inevitable conflicts, sometimes very intense.  And...I'm not giving away the story since it happens at the beginning...Lydia's drowning death in the nearby lake is the trigger setting off not only the story's subsequent events and how the surviving family members resolve their grief and conflicts, but also many interspersed flashbacks, including those from Lydia herself.  There is an ongoing mystery as well: how and why did she die, and what about the teenage rebel neighbor Jack, whom Nathan loathes and suspects of foul play regarding his sister?  Guess you'll have to read it to find out.  As for my own reactions, I will say that there is a lot of scrutiny about the marriage between white Marilyn and Chinese-descended James and the real (and imagined) hostility and prejudice that they and their children unfairly receive for this.  And Marilyn is loaded with resentment for how she had wanted to become a physician but was held back by resistance from her own family and society as a whole because she is a woman.  So, I get it, this story...compelling as it was...I believed still derived much of its critical success from appealing to victimized identity groups, not that I am diminishing the fact that discrimination and prejudice affect us.  What appealed most to me personally was how Ng reveals the often-wide chasm of communication differences between parents and their children, especially with regard to how mother and father often transfer their own past, frustrated dreams to their sons and daughters, expecting them to accomplish what they themselves could not.  That I also totally get, and the author nailed it perfectly.  Everything I Never Told You is very well written, but it's also pretty sad and might well cause anyone reading it to reflect on their own family histories and relationships...