By: Celeste Ng (Repeat Author)
Highly Recommend
TLDR: This book perfectly highlights the complexities of a Mid-Western family grieving the loss of a daughter/sister, and offers a glimpse of how each family member’s actions and reactions shapes the behavior of others. It’s intriguing more than anything else.
When I read the synopsis of this novel I thought I’d be learning more about what happened to Lydia Lee. And though you do eventually learn about Lydia’s demise, what’s more intriguing is how Celeste Ng artfully weaves the stories of the remaining family members together while highlighting the things they aren’t sharing with each other.
Reading this book reminded me of some advice my therapist once gave me: if you aren’t clear about your feelings and intentions, children will often fill in the blanks and that can lead to assumptions that aren’t always correct. This book highlights that perhaps that behavior isn’t just limited to children and we see the repercussions of the words left unsaid with all members of the Lee family.
This novel is raw and emotional in ways I wasn’t expecting and for that it gets the “highly recommend”. I’ll try to keep the ratings here simple: do not recommend, recommend, or highly recommend. I’ll also let you know when we’ve got a repeat author (as I did above).
Celeste Ng is also known for Little Fires Everywhere (read and reviewed on IG), and her upcoming release, Our Missing Hearts.
