Everything I Never Told You

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. On a morning in May 1977, the Lee family in a small Ohio town discovers that their sixteen-year-old daughter Lydia has not come downstairs for breakfast as usual; her bed is neatly made, but she is nowhere to be found. Days later, her body is found in a nearby lake. Lydia is the middle child; her father James is a second-generation Chinese immigrant, her mother Marilyn is white. She inherited her mother's blue eyes and also carries all of her parents' unfulfilled expectations: her father wants her to fit in and become the center of a social circle, her mother wants her to become a doctor and fulfill the dream she was forced to abandon. She obediently takes on every expectation but never dares to say what she truly wants. Her brother Nath is convinced the bad boy next door, Jack, is involved; her mother is determined to find whoever killed her daughter; only little Hannah, always overlooked, sees more clearly than anyone. The novel begins with Lydia's death and looks back over decades of this multiracial family's history: James's insecurity and sense of displacement, the education Marilyn gave up for marriage, and how parental love gradually becomes a weight that crushes a child. When the truth comes out, the real answer lies not in others. The book is about 167,000 Chinese characters.