“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.” This book is a fantastic character portrait. I don't read these kinds of stories too often - family dramas with a focus on the everyday - but when I do I'm usually pleasantly surprised. As much as I'm a lover of amazing story arcs with problems and terrifying consequences, there really is something so fascinating about... people.A book that focuses on the dynamics bet

this book is absolutely perfect.it's easily one of the best contemporary family dramas i have ever read, and i have read more than a few.ng's prose is outstanding, and her characters are vibrant, completely three-dimensional, and the way their stories knot up in each other is superb.it opens with the death of sixteen-year-old lydia, the beloved middle child of marilyn and james lee. marilyn and james are a mixed-race chinese/caucasian couple living in a small town in ohio in the seventies, where...

*3.5 stars*There’s a quiet and almost simple beauty to Celeste Ng’s storytelling. She’s not a writer that relies on a breakneck pace or frilly overtures to capture readers. Instead, Ng employs the emotional beings that live among her pages and their relatable family dynamics to do the job. Each character takes a turn tiptoeing into the room, catching the reader almost unaware, and inciting a level of curiosity. Curiosity that morphs into a quest for answers in more ways than one.Something to kee...

5 Stars.Have you ever felt invisible? Like you were hiding in plain sight? Or like you just didn't measure up? Like you have to fake it till you make it? For the Lee family, this is par for the course, for each member of the family has felt one or more of these things at one time in their lives, if not for their entire lives. James and Marilyn Lee are a Chinese-American couple with three children, Nath, Lydia and Hannah. Growing up Chinese in the 50's, James, was an outsider - he longed to fit i...

Everything I Knew Told Your by Celeste Ng is a 2015 Penguin Books publication. As I began this book, my mind was a clean slate, with absolutely no preconceived ideas about it, so I was really surprised by it, and stunned by my emotional response to it. Once I started it, I literally did not move from the couch until I had turned the last page. One of the main topics addressed here is the interracial marriage between a white woman, Marilyn, and an American Chinese man, James, who marry in the lat...

I did not enjoy reading this book. The story of this broken family was just so sad and I found that the more I read, the harder it was to read. I felt a constant knot in my stomach .Yet I gave it four stars.It’s the 1970's and James of Chinese descent, born in the U.S has since he was a young boy, just wanted to fit in. The racism he experiences through his life follows to present day and to his mixed race children. He focuses his need and desire to fit in on his middle daughter, Lydia. He wants...

This book is a family portrait exploring how race and identity can affect the upbringing of children. The dynamics between the parents and children, and how they become fractured in their attempts (or lack thereof) to understand one another, are the main focus of the story. While I really enjoyed Little Fires Everywhere, I didn’t like this book as much. Besides not finding the characters to be engaging enough to hold my interest, my main gripe is that the messaging is very in-your-face. The char...

I received this book for review from Penguin Boy oh boy was I impressed by this book. Before I started reading it I was expecting something Lovely Bones esc. No. So much better. This story is kicks off with the reader finding out about the death of the "favorite child" Lydia, with this I assumed it would just be an emotional book about finding the cause of death ect ect. Nope. But also yes. This book's scope is beyond what I was first expecting and branches off in so many directions as we follow...

What a wonderful book to start off the new year! This has been on my shelf for years, and I'm kicking myself for not picking it up sooner.This story starts with a small seed - Lydia Lee is dead - and blossoms in every direction. Through non-linear perspective shifts, each member of Lydia's family deals with their grief in different ways, reflecting on their lives and filling us in on more of the mystery. We come to understand the expectations and dreams each had for themselves as well as Lydia a...

I can't believe it took me this long to read a book by Celeste Ng. This book, as the saying goes, has EVERYTHING. Mysterious deaths. Family drama. History. Clandestine relationships. Secrets. It's #OwnVoices and it's literary fiction, which have been the two categories I can't get enough of so far this year. It's somehow captivating and unputdownable while being quiet and real.It is, in short, extremely good and an all around dreamy read to me. Ms. Ng, I am so sorry that I have wronged you by wa...

"How suffocating it is to be loved that much." Everything I Never Told You centers around the Lee family: James, the Chinese-American professor who lectures on the epitome of what was never attainable for him—true Americanism—Marilyn, the blond wife who’d always dreamed of being a doctor when female doctors were a rare phenomenon only to turn out just what her mother had hoped and what Marilyn had always wished to avoid, and their three children, Nathan, Lydia and Hannah. James and Marilyn focu...

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/ “They will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure.” Hrrrrrrrrm. Good news is, I don’t think it’s necessarily only me this time. The problem for me with Everything I Never Told You was with the characters. I d...