A review by fulltimefiction
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

4.0

I didn’t expect to like this book honestly. I do judge books from their covers in a way. “Everything I Never Told You” screams YA contemporary. So it stuck in my head that way. I was recommended this book after reading Little Fires Everywhere and I honestly liked Everything I Never Told You more than LFE. Both books are good. But there was something that gripped me to the story told here. Celeste Ng is very talented at writing fleshed-out flawed characters that make you want to continue reading their story. And her characters have more than a fair share of faults.

This book tells the story of a family. The father is of Chinese descent but the mother is American. Their beloved daughter, Lydia, died and they’re suspecting she was murdered. Her siblings, Nate and Hannah lived in her shadow their whole lives, their parents barely noticing them.

Listening to this book, I felt like I truly know these characters. Say what you want about Celeste Ng, one thing that can’t be denied is writing three-dimensional characters and make one care about them while fully knowing they are not exactly “good”. You see, there are two types of characters:
- in one the authors want you to root for their protagonists whether they are morally gray or white. Sometimes they succeed but other times, the character annoys the heck out of you and you dislike them/think they’re stupid/etc. Although this is not the author’s intention.
- in rare cases (depending on the genre you read), the author is fully aware they’re writing about heavily flawed characters. The tricky part is making the reader like the story anyway.

Celeste Ng’s characters belong to the second category. Yes, the father pissed me off and I hated what he did. Yes, the mother acted selfishly. Yes, Nate wasn’t the perfect brother (but honestly, given his circumstances, I can’t blame him either). Now Hannah is sweet and I can’t say one bad thing about her, she deserves a better family. Yet, I was captivated reading this book. The truth was often ugly and harsh. The characters, more often than not, unenjoyable but interesting nonetheless. So you see, I understand why people might not like this book. Heck, I didn’t enjoy it all that much but as I said, the drama enthralled me and sometimes I just stopped whatever I'm doing to listen…

This book makes an excellent audiobook, I also liked the narration. Another book I would’ve appreciated less if I read the ebook. It’s very character-heavy. We get to know their past (no single perspective), present, inner thoughts, feelings, and I was able to picture them vividly in my head.

I’d recommend this book to any fan of family dramas and don’t mind character-focused books. If you enjoyed LFE, I think it’s worth giving this book a shot too. Also, if you’re an audiobook fan, this book makes excellent audio.

The last thing I want to mention before closing this review is that this book is written mainly in the 70s. As an Asian family, they suffered from racism at school, college, from their local community, everywhere. It saddens me to see the hate they had to face and how heavily it affected them, shaped their lives, and return their behavior with each other. What makes me sadder still and angry is that even now, 50 years later, we still see shootings of East Asians (women) just because of their race. And while a lot has changed since that era, if people are still getting killed for their race and their field of work.