[title subtitle=”review: Anita Paddock”][/title]
by Celeste Ng
Penguin Press, 292 pages: $2695
The title alone tells you this book is about secrets. And that immediately makes a reader curious. So when you take it from the shelf at the book store or the library, and open it to the first page, you’ll read these words: Lydia is dead. But they don’t know that yet. That sentence will reel you in. And once you read the next few sentences, you’ll not be able to put this book down.
That’s exactly what happened to me. I was immediately taken in by this family: James, who is of Chinese descent and a professor of history at a college in Ohio; Marilyn, his blue-eyed wife; and his children Lydia, Nathan, and Hannah.
The story revolves around Lydia, who is her parents’ darling, and the police investigation into her disappearance. It is 1977, Lydia is sixteen, and she is a beauty, with her mother’s blue eyes and her father’s black hair. Her parents think she’s beautiful and exceptionally talented. Her father has pushed her to be popular at school (because he wasn’t), and her mother’s dream is for her to become a doctor (she went to Radcliffe and planned on going to medical school, but ended up as a housewife instead).
Lydia tries to accommodate her parents’ wishes and doesn’t want to disappoint them. In reality, Lydia has few friends because as a Chinese-American, she just doesn’t fit in. She pretends to talk on the phone to different girls so her father will think she is sought after by all the right girls.
Her brother Nathan is a year older and has already been awarded a scholarship to Harvard, but he is not the favorite of the family. Neither is Hannah, the youngest, who is so neglected by her family that she sits under tables and chairs and quietly observes. Actually, Hannah is the most likable of the entire family. She knows the most about Lydia and her disappearance. Add to the mix a local bad boy who saw Lydia just before she went missing, and the mystery grows.
This novel is set in the 1970s, a time when a mixed-race family in a small Ohio college town was something of a rarity, and the family suffered because of it. The book unfolds by moving between Lydia’s story and her family’s quest to find out what happened to her, what went so terribly wrong. Along the way, they find out things about themselves and about Lydia that never would have surfaced if tragedy hadn’t struck.
This is author Celeste Ng’s first novel, and it is an incredible read that’s being called a literary thriller. Her language is lyrical and carefully chosen. There is not an excess word in the book. The story is captivating and brilliantly told, and will pull at your heartstrings to the very end.
