"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl ...

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.