Everything I Never Told You

This is a fiction book, I picked it up after watching the series Little Fires Everywhere based on another of Celeste Ng's books.

It is look at the challenges faced by a multicultural couple living and raising children in a predominantly white, homogeneous part of America.

I give it 3.5 stars. It's a tragic, slow moving story about an American-Chinese family in the 1970's but with long flashbacks to the 1960's. It tells of what it is to be different and trying to fit and it tells of the damage family members can do to one another through misunderstandings and secrets. Not a book to read if you need something uplifting and hopeful.

Unfortunately only a very few people turned up for this book club meeting so the discussion was a little shorter than usual.

We discussed the issue that we might be missing certain elements of the book because we're all white, maybe we would have got more from it if we were of the same ethnic group as the author? Also, we're all a lot older than the protagonists so again we might be missing some elements of the story.

We felt really sorry for all the children in the book and their family situation. Lydia had so much pressure put on her by her mother whereas the two other siblings (Nathan and Hannah) were really just ignored as the parents put so much of their effort into the one child they felt was going to achieve the most.

It was so sad that everyone in the book was keeping a secret and if they had just spoken to each other about these things maybe some of the tragedy would not have happened. Everything just spiralled completely out of control so quickly and easily when they just didn't talk to each other.

Overall we gave this book 6 out of 10.