The mystery for the reader is not whether Lydia is still alive, or where she’s gone - we learn on the first page that Lydia is dead, her body found at the bottom of the lake. A blue-eyed Amerasian Susan Dey, the most white-looking of her siblings in her mixed-race Chinese and white family, she is also so serious, so driven, so good and responsible, she seems the least likely to go missing. The missing girl is Lydia Lee, apple of her father’s eye, her mother’s favorite daughter. If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now. This is familiar territory, but Ng returns to it to spin an unfamiliar tale, with a very different kind of girl from the ones we’ve been asked to follow before. The year is 1977, the setting, a quiet all-American town in Ohio, where everyone knows one another and nothing like this has ever happened before. Celeste Ng’s debut novel, “Everything I Never Told You,” is a literary thriller that begins with some stock elements: a missing girl, a lake, a local bad boy who was one of the last to see her and won’t say what he knows.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |