“A subtle meditation on gender, race and the weight of one generation’s unfulfilled ambitions upon the shoulders – and in the heads – of the next.”
— SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
As a debut novel by Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You topped Amazon’s Best Book list of 2014. The novel has gotten so much praise because its diversified topics and theme and its reflections of social problems in the 1970s. Ng subtly divides the plots into two parts: past and present, and leads readers to explore the dead causes of a young Chinese-American girl, Lydia. Therefore, the attractive plots are also an important factor that the novel gets overwhelming praise. Even so, criticism is a critical part to make a writer progress in the writing career. Thus, both praise and criticism of Everything I Never Told You are showed; readers are also able to browse the reviews from different angles here.
PRAISE
An aspect of plots
“If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now… Ng has set two tasks in this novel’s doubled heart—to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime. She does both by turning the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of secrets the family members won’t share… What emerges is a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle. This is, in the end, a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind—a burden you do not always survive.”
— ALEXANDER CHEE, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
An aspect of genre and theme
“From the first sentence of Celeste Ng’s stunning debut, we know that the oldest daughter of the Chinese-American Lee family has died. What follows is a novel that explores alienation, achievement, race, gender, family, and identity–as the police must unravel what has happened to Lydia, the Lee family must uncover the sister and daughter that they hardly knew. There isn’t a false note in this book, and my only concern in describing my profound admiration for Everything I Never Told You is that it might raise unachievable expectations in the reader. But it’s that good. Achingly, precisely, and sensitively written.”
— CHRIS SCHLUEP, AMAZON.COM BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH
An aspect of writing skill
“[A]n accomplished debut… It’s also heart-wrenching. Ng deftly pulls together the strands of this complex, multigenerational novel. Everything I Never Told You is an engaging work that casts a powerful light on the secrets that have kept an American family together — and that finally end up tearing it apart.”
— LOS ANGELES TIMES
An aspect of characters
“Celeste Ng leavens the bridge between the disappearance of a young girl, and the personal histories that precede it, with the larger canvas issues of race and gender, without straying from the riveting emotional territory that make up the cornerstones of family: what is given, what is withheld, and what can never be known. Lydia Lee is every parent’s dream, fear, and devastation, wholly loved, just as completely lost. It is impossible to resist grieving alongside each one of these bereft, deeply realized characters, for we live their lives, and their story becomes ours from the first paragraph of this marvelous book.”
— RU FREEMAN, AUTHOR OF A DISOBEDIENT GIRL AND ON SAL MAL LANE
Readers’ Review of Everything I Never Told You From WAMU 88.5
An Academic Review of Everything I Never Told You
https://www.davidpublisher.org/Public/uploads/Contribute/594331ad3567e.pdf
CRITICISM
“And yet, the warmth with which Ng considers her characters provides testimony to the goodness that can be found in people — though this, perhaps, only makes the central tragedy all the more gut-wrenching.”
— CLAIRE FALLON, HUFFPOST
Huilin Qi ’19