A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Winner of the Alex Award and the Massachusetts Book Award • Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Grantland Booklist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, School Library Journal, Bustle, and Time Our New York The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts “A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine “Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly “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. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and 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.

NUBClub basically shared the opinion that Everything I Never Told You was a decent novel that didn't quite make sense. What worked about the book was the Lee family. As a depiction of a family that was desperate to connect and continually falling to understand each other, Ng's novel does a good job of making us sympathetic to both the causes and the aftermath of the central plot element. The issue we had is that the primary motivators of the plot didn't really make sense. Basically, we weren't sure why the characters were making the choices they did -- it seemed like the motivations for all the critical actions of the novel came from nowhere. What exactly motivates Lydia to drown herself in the lake? I mean, we can see that there are issues in the family, but what drives her to an action that extreme? You would think there would be more explication, or at least implied tracklaying to that cause, but no, it just kind of happens. This pattern occurs again when her brother almost commits suicide the same way. What is motivating him to make the attempt? Why does he stop? It just seems like a whim strikes him, and that's not a compelling reason you can empathize with. Over and over, it seems like Ng just has the characters act so that the plot takes a certain shape, but there's just no internal logic holding it together. So ultimately, despite some good writing and strong relationships, the novel just fails to live up to its potential.