In October I got a fanta-bulous book haul from a local annual jumble sale, including Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. In jumble sale situations there's not much you can do except judge a book by its cover unless you spot one you have wanted to read for a while. In the case of Everything I Never Told You, I read the blurb, thought it sounded a bit like Riverdale (dead body of teenager found in lake in small American town, whodunit vibes) and would therefore be a decent read. Besides, you can't go wrong at 3 for £1.
What I thought would be a semi-good book completely surpassed my expectations. Not only was it a fantastic story, well thought out and well written, it was also complex in its handling of various themes. Also, it avoided the over-dramatic, thriller/ whodunit angle in favour of a much more sophisticated yet simple explanation.
Everything I Never Told You is about an underrepresented mixed race family (Chinese American) in an underrepresented setting - small town America in the 60s and 70s. I'm saying underrepresented because I personally have never encountered this genre of identity story, which either says a lot about my own limited reading perimeters, the school/ university curriculum, or both.
