#celeste ng
Nine Books I Want You to Read This Summer
If you haven’t read these books yet, you need to, and you need to do it soon. These are some of my favorite books by women about women that I’ve read over the last year or so, and they’re the ones that have stuck with me. I firmly recommend all of these, in no particular order.
A contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre set in NYC in 2001, Re Jane follows the titular character through not only her recognizable past but through a new future that tackles extended family relationships as well as contemporary woman- and adulthood.
The Girls from Corona del Mar, Rufi Thorpe
Rufi Thorpe’s debut novel is out in paperback this summer, following the lives of Mia and Lorrie Ann, childhood friends whose stories diverge and meet again over the course of what feels like a young lifetime. As both women struggle with bringing family baggage into their adult lives, they learn what the reality of adult friendship can be.
After her father died, Charley Bordelonfound she’d inherited a sugar cane farm in rural Louisiana, so she packed up her life and her daughter to move from Los Angeles to reunite with her childhood family and friends. As she learns, moving back home after many years comes with its own challenges, not limited to the struggle she faces on the farm.
The second book in Tana French’s tenuously-linked Dublin Murder Squad series, The Likeness follows Det. Cassie Maddox as she revisits her Undercover days after the body of a young woman is found, with her former false identity - and a practically identical face. Cassie finds herself deep undercover after taking back on the identity, trying to determine who the killer is without finding herself in trouble.
Based on Bolick’s widely-publicized Atlantic article, Spinster is a non-fiction exploration of not only what it means to be a single woman in the 21st century but how women push to distinguish themselves in careers, particularly as writers. She ties in the stories of well-known “spinster” women writers from the last few centuries, giving historical context to what turns out to be a not-so-new struggle.
The Gracekeepers, Kirsty Logan
Inspired in part by Scottish myth, Kirsty Logan’s ethereal debut tells the alternating stories of North, who travels with a floating circus, and Callanish, a gracekeeper who presides over a watery cemetery. As circumstance brings them together, both young women wonder if they’re really satisfied with where their lives have taken them thus far.
Charlie Wong is a young dishwasher in Chinatown who dreams of a life that will let her see the rest of the world, or, at least, the rest of New York City. When she gets a receptionist job at a dance studio uptown, she gains confidence in herself, but as her mother’s talent as a ballerina comes out in her own life, Charlie must learn how to balance the two halves of her life.
Roxane Gay’s debut novel follows Mireille, visiting her Haitian family with her husband and young son. When Miri is kidnapped for ransom and her father refuses to pay, she is subjected to the brutalities of captivity and must rely on herself to survive. Not for the faint of heart, An Untamed State is a gut-wrenching insight into an infrequently-mentioned topic.
Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng’s debut novel begins with the death of teenager Lydia Lee in 1970s Ohio, and unravels a story of what happened to her and how her family deals with it. This is the story of a mixed-race family with some secrets laid bare and some secrets still to come.
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AUTORA: Celeste Ng
EDITORA: Intrínseca
ESTRELAS: 5/5
Em uma manhã de 1977, Lydia não está em casa. Após um tempo, seu corpo é encontrado em um lago na cidade onde ela morava junto com sua família. O livro é contado pelo ponto de vista de todos da família, cada um tentando entender o que aconteceu.
Esse livro fala de muitos assuntos importantes, como a diferença entre raças, as expectativas frustradas dos pais que as colocam sob os filhos e dinâmicas familiares. E tudo é posto de uma forma fluida e muito bem feita. Outro assunto bastante abordado é o luto e como cada um lida com ele de um jeito diferente, sendo esse, mais um assunto que Celeste Ng trabalha com maestria.
Para mim, o que mais se destacou no livro foi a questão das expectativas que os pais colocam em seus filhos e como isso faz com que eles enxerguem pessoas completamente diferentes do que realmente são. A autora também mostra como não há um certo e errado, são simplesmente formas diferentes de lidar com o outro.
Eu amei demais esse livro, assim como Pequenos incêndios por toda parte, e recomendo para todo mundo que gosta de livros que foquem mais nos personagens do que em uma história em si. Pode parecer uma leitura lenta para alguns, mas eu me vi envolvida do início ao fim, então espero que gostem tanto quanto eu. Obrigada por lerem :)
All I see is sky and water to the horizon, and its like, how much longer am I gonna have to swim? - Izzy, Little Fires Everywhere
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“It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn’t know you wanted.
What was it? Was it a boy? Was it a vocation? Or was it a whole life?”
-Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” This is the first line of Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng’s debut novel. It’s May 1977 in small-town Ohio and James, a Chinese-American professor, and Marilyn, a white housewife, are going about their married morning. Blue-eyed, dark-haired Lydia Lee is the middle child and their favorite. Her younger sister Hannah is the first to comment on Lydia’s absence, and it descends into horror from there. Lydia’s body is found soon after; apparently she drowned in the lake near their house. The Lees’ lives detonate, of course, but this story is far from your typical “lost child” tale. How each person in Lydia’s life absorbs the reality of her death is only a fraction of the narrative, which is why I fell in love with it. Everything I Never Told You is subtly exquisite.
I was drawn to this novel for many reasons. First of all, it’s set in Ohio, where I’ve always lived. I’m also fascinated by familial drama and the cultural atmosphere of the 1970s and the author’s name is lovely: Celeste Ng, pronounced ing. It’s aesthetically and phonetically pleasing. And chiefly, it explores the lives of an interracial couple and their children—being an African-American with very fair skin, I grew up being identified and treated like a multiracial person, even though I’m not (I have white ancestry but it’s too far back to matter). Those feelings of isolation and social anxiety and mild body dysmorphia forever in my marrow. The various racially-charged interpersonal dramas. So what are you? What are you? No one looking like me, not anywhere I looked, not ever. When the local newspaper writes about Lydia after her death, they mention how alone she was, how she didn’t have any friends, and the editorialist always mentions directly before or after that she was the only Asian girl at the school, that she stood out in the halls. No one looked like her, not there, where she looked.
While Ng unveils the complex inner life of our dead 16-year-old heroine, she deftly weaves in the equally multifaceted inner lives of her family, sliding back and forth in time and place. The ways that James, Marilyn, Nath, and Hannah loved Lydia illuminates each of their fatal flaws. If this were a Shakespearean tragedy they would all be dead by the end, except Hannah, who would bear witness, being the shadow—the keen observer in their quiet world of love and betrayal. Ng shifts focus expertly, without any indication that we are changing perspective, except for the tender white space between scenes.
We learn how very different difference means to James and Marilyn, and how that shapes their parenting styles, for better and for worse. James grew up as the perpetual outsider, being Chinese in a sea of white classmates, being working poor among a sea of middle-class and wealthy peers. This all contributes to his marrying Marilyn. “This was the first reason he came to love her: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.”
For Marilyn, difference is salvation. She grew up desperate to distinguish herself from her fiercely traditional home-ec teacher mother, which illuminates her own initial feelings for James, who came into her life as a young history professor. “How skinny he was, she thought, how wide his shoulders were, like a swimmer’s, his skin the color of tea, of fall leaves toasted by the sun. She had never seen anyone like him.” She was on her way to becoming a doctor before she fell in love with James and became another pretty housewife, despite her best efforts to avoid such a life. Years later, when she discovers that she’s pregnant with their youngest, Hannah, and James comes to her, “[e]verything she had dreamed for herself faded away, like fine mist on a breeze. She could not remember now why she thought it had all been possible.”
These defeats and desires linger in their bones, shaping how they raise their children. They do love them; they’re positively drowning in it (no pun intended), but they betray them anyway. Perhaps some form of betrayal is inevitable for everyone.
The atmosphere of this novel reminds me of one of my all-time favorite novels and film adaptations, The Virgin Suicides. Thick and soft, silent, poisonous. The pulpy suffocation of the parents. Lydia’s apparent and assumed virginal suicide. The way no one truly knew her, like no one truly knew the Lisbon sisters. Everything I Never Told You is the perfect title—it’s plump with every characters’ wretched, deafening secrets. Everyone is an iceberg—the vastness of them hidden below their self-revealed surfaces.
In the midst of all this, there’s Jack, Nath’s envy and enemy, and the only real friend Lydia had. I won’t ruin the heart-rending twist in Jack’s story, but I will say that he is there to the end, and he is more than he appears, to Nath and Lydia alike, and I could see the twist coming, but it was executed so flawlessly that I was still deliciously devastated.
Some may say the ending is rushed, but I believe it was building methodically to such a conclusion all along. It wasn’t a happy ending—it wasn’t necessarily thrilling, but there is a release, a deep exhalation, a sort of coalescing. So much of it is still vivid in my mind now, days after reading it; that tortured glare of Jack’s with his golden-tipped eyelashes, Hannah curled and absorbent under the kitchen table, the Lees crossing the last name off a tidy list of teen girl false friends, the tragic scent of lemons, Marilyn’s mother’s cookbook, “the curve of Louisa’s back and the pale silk of her thighs and the dark sweep of her hair,” Nath and the astronauts, Lydia’s silver heart on a chain, the smell of the lake .This is a terrifically nuanced, haunting novel that is practically begging for its own film adaptation. Someone brilliant, please make my wish your command.
Review by Dawn West.
Lisa See’s Step Inside the World of On Gold Mountain shares some of her own family research and offers genealogy research tips for Chinese Americans, including descendants of paper sons.
Last year Celeste Ng, who had several paper son ancestors, talked with me about her wonderful novel, Everything I Never Told You, and, among other things, family secrets and her lost family poem.
