| |
1 |
Everything I Never Told You: A Novel
Author:
Ng, Celeste
|
| |
|
Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
Demand: Average
|
LC: PS3614.G
Print Run: 50000
|
|
ISBN-13: 9781594205712
LCCN: 2013039961
Imprint: Penguin Press
|
|
Pub Date: 06/26/2014
Availability: Available
List: $28.00
|
| |
Hardcover
|
|
|
Physical Description:
|
297 pages ; 22 cm
H 8.5",
W 5.6",
D 1.04",
0.925 lbs.
|
|
LC Series:
|
|
|
Brodart Sources:
|
Brodart's Diverse Titles: Asian & Pacific Islander (Adult)
Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
|
|
Bibliographies:
|
Fiction Core Collection, 18th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 19th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 20th ed.
Texas Lariate Reading List
|
|
Awards:
|
Alex Awards
Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature Winners
Booklist Editors Choice
Booklist Starred Reviews
Library Journal Starred Reviews
New York Times Notable Books
Publishers Weekly Starred Reviews
School Library Journal Best Adult Books for High School Students
|
|
Starred Reviews:
|
Booklist
Library Journal
Publishers Weekly
|
|
TIPS Subjects:
|
Mystery/Detective Fiction
Domestic Fiction
Young Adult
Asian-American & Pacific Islander
|
|
BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Asian American & Pacific Islander
FICTION / Thrillers / General
|
|
LC Subjects:
|
Daughter, Death, Fiction
Daughters, Death, Fiction
Drowning, Fiction
FICTION / Literary
Grief, Fiction
Mystery fiction
Suspense fiction
|
|
SEARS Subjects: |
Daughters, Death, Fiction
Grief, Fiction
Mystery fiction
Psychological fiction
|
|
Reading Programs: |
Lexile Level:
870
Reading Counts Level:
5.6
,
Points: 19.0
|
|
|
| |
| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 02/01/2014 |
| Chinese-Americans Marilyn and James Lee had such high, albeit different, hopes for their beloved middle daughter, Lydia, until the day the girl's body showed up in a local lake. Now the small-town 1970s family faces the fallout as secrets tear them apart. Marilyn vengefully seeks the guilty party; James Lee heads toward a reckless affair; Lydia's brother suspects a neighborhood bad-boy; and only the youngest child could hold the key to the truth. Debut Novel, 304pp., 50K, Auth res: Cambridge, MA |
|
| Starred Reviews: |
| Booklist | 05/15/2014 |
| A teenage girl goes missing and is later found to have drowned in a nearby lake, and suddenly a once tight-knit family unravels in unexpected ways. As the daughter of a college professor and his stay-at-home wife in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, Lydia Lee is already unwittingly part of the greater societal changes going on all around her. But Lydia suffers from pressure that has nothing to do with tuning out and turning on. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting. Her mother is white, and their interracial marriage raises eyebrows and some intrusive charges of miscegenation. More troubling, however, is her mother's frustration at having given up medical school for motherhood, and how she blindly and selfishly insists that Lydia follow her road not taken. The cracks in Lydia's perfect-daughter foundation grow slowly but erupt suddenly and tragically, and her death threatens to destroy her parents and deeply scar her siblings. Tantalizingly thrilling, Ng's emotionally complex debut novel captures the tension between cultures and generations with the deft touch of a seasoned writer. Ng will be one to watch. Haggas, Carol. 292p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2014. |
|
| Library Journal | 05/01/2014 |
| Ng's debut is one of those aching stories about which the reader knows so much more than any of the characters, even as each yearns for the unknowable truth. "Lydia is dead," the novel opens--blunt, unnerving, devastating. She's only 16, the middle of three children of James and Marilyn Lee, a mixed-race couple married years before the ironically named Loving v. Virginia finally invalidated U.S. antimiscegenation laws in 1967. They're initially drawn together by their differences: James, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants, finishing his Harvard PhD; Marilyn, the only Radcliffe undergraduate determined to become a doctor, a gifted scientist among unbelieving men. When they bury their daughter in 1977, the Lee family--already fragile before the tragedy--implodes. James detaches, Marilyn seeks refuge, brother Nath blames, and youngest Hannah silently watches all. Each will search for a Lydia who doesn't exist, desperate to parse what happened. VERDICT Ng constructs a mesmerizing narrative that shrinks enormous issues of race, prejudice, identity, and gender into the miniaturist dynamics of a single family. A breathtaking triumph, reminiscent of prophetic debuts by Ha Jin, Chang-rae Lee, and Chimamanda Adichie, whose first titles matured into spectacular, continuing literary legacies. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]. Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC. 304p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2014. |
|
| Publishers Weekly | 04/14/2014 |
| This emotionally involving debut novel explores themes of belonging using the story of the death of a teenage girl, Lydia, from a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio. Lydia is the middle and favorite child of Marilyn Walker, a white Virginian, and James Lee, a first-generation Chinese-American. Marilyn and James meet in 1957, when she is a premed at Radcliffe and he, a graduate student, is teaching one of her classes. The two fall in love and marry, over the objections of Marilyn's mother, whose comment on their interracial relationship is succinct: "It's not right." Marilyn gets pregnant and gives up her dream of becoming a doctor, devoting her life instead to raising Lydia and the couple's other two children, Nathan and Hannah. Then Marilyn abruptly moves out of their suburban Ohio home to go back to school, only to return before long. When Lydia is discovered dead in a nearby lake, the family begins to fall apart. As the police try to decipher the mystery of Lydia's death, her family realize that they didn't know her at all. Lydia is remarkably imagined, her unhappy teenage life crafted without an ounce of cliche. Ng's prose is precise and sensitive, her characters richly drawn. Agent: Julie Barer, Barer Literary. (July). 292p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2014. |
|
| Journal Reviews |
| Kirkus Reviews | 06/01/2014 |
| Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parents--blonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor James--older brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydia--a promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother, Nath--to slip away from home and venture out in a rowboat late at night when she had always been deathly afraid of water, refusing to learn to swim? The surprising answers lie deep beneath the surface, and Ng, whose stories have won awards including the Pushcart Prize, keeps an admirable grip on the narrative's many strands as she expertly explores and exposes the Lee family's secrets: the dreams that have given way to disappointment; the unspoken insecurities, betrayals and yearnings; the myriad ways the Lees have failed to understand one another and, perhaps, themselves. These long-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page.Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface. 304pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2014. |
|
| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 12/16/2013 |
| Since Ng won the Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan's writing program, whose honorees range from Arthur Miller and Mary Gaitskill to Laura Kasischke and Jesmyn Ward, I'm pretty excited about this debut. The story opens, "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." In 1970s Ohio, blue-eyed Marilyn wants daughter Lydia to become a doctor, as she herself never could, while Lydia's father, Chinese American James Lee, wants her to be popular. Now she's at the bottom of a lake, her older brother suspects the local bad boy, and her little sister understands more about what happened than anyone. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
|
9781594205712,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 08/17/2014 |
|
|
|