Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Everything I Never Told You

Wow, I loved this book. I get why it isn’t necessarily beloved by all readers, but I enjoy domestic mysteries, and stories that look at family dynamics. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s the Big Brother in me. 😅

I felt sad as I learned about this family from the various perspectives, and I felt challenged by choices made by the characters presented.

It’s interesting how as adults we want to make different choices than those before us, yet in many ways, we end up making the same mistakes anyway.

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vurawnica's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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hodgeonlucy's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Ng writes family dysfunction and pain so well that anyone reading this book who has experienced some form of family trauma is likely to be slightly triggered. Although I certainly had a visceral reaction to the book, I loved it. It was quietly hypnotic and addicting; Ng let the plot unfold methodically yet unexpectedly, feeding the reader just enough to keep them informed yet slightly too little so they were still out of the loop. Ng's writing is flawless; her ability to move narrator within paragraphs without it being confusing or inaccessible is quite remarkable and a style that worked wonderfully for this book. It allowed the reader to flit around the family who, whilst a unit, were not connected; the narration style highlighted this disconnection and allowed us to see each characters' perspective isolated from the other characters, mirroring exactly how the Lee family was living. The book, in this sense, was frustrating and sad with so many instances of poor communication and intergenerational trauma as well as external pressures such as racism. Whilst it is a hard read and one that may challenge anyone who does not have the emotional capacity for the topics it explores, this book is incredibly poignant and moving. It has left me deeply questioning the idea of parenthood, how it has manifested itself in my life, and how I may reproduce this in the future without any real introspection.

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cats_and_lemons's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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sonygaystation's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This book made me emotional. 😭 I struggled to read it quickly because it just made me really sad. It's very introspective and painful and Ng does a really good job of showing how every little aspect of this family from the get-go was set up to cause problems down the line. It's the pressures parents put on their children and how generationally damaging that is. It's the pressures we put on ourselves to please our parents. It's the desire to hold on tight to constancy and how we struggle in the face of change. It's the emotional turmoil of feeling alone in a group of people, of not feeling seen or known by your family, of anger and hurt colouring the way you interact with everyone. It's your racial identity shaping your world. It's what we keep hidden from the ones we love. It's a strained relationship with a daughter who bears the brunt of all these expectations and it's her death without resolution. It makes me so sad to think Lydia died feeling all of these things and it makes me sad for her family left behind to not know she felt all of these things. And it especially makes me sad that her death could have been avoided if every one of the above didn't happen, but the irony is that would mean a fundamental change in literally everyone's lives and the experiences they had that shaped them into this. The dynamics of family are tough and the one's in this book are so painfully layered.

THIS LINE ?? "And, after a while, the biggest fear of all: of losing Nath, the only one who understood the strange and brittle balance in their family. Who knew all that had happened. Who had always kept her afloat." or this one??? "How hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved." hnnnnng I just felt it. I FELT it. And it hurt me!!!!

Basically tl;dr this family felt doomed and I cried!!!!

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anne311's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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