Finished: Everything I Never Told You (Ng) Well, that was a depressing book about the death of a teenage girl whose parents pressured her so much, her mother to become a doctor and her father to fit in and have friends, that you think all throughout the book she's killed herself. Of course, she does have those feelings of despair at times, but that's not what she has resolved to do when we finally learn the real truth of her death at the end. Lydia is the nearly 16 year old daughter of a Chinese father, James, and a Caucasian mother, Marilyn, who fall in love and get married in the 60's. Marilyn's mother disapproves and never speaks to her again. Marilyn is determined NOT to be the stay-at-home, baking, homemaker that her own mother was, out to only find a good man for a husband. Marilyn wants to be a doctor and is smart enough to do it. When she falls in love with James, though, she puts those dreams on hold when her first two children, Nath and Lydia are born. When the kids are 7 and 5, Lydia can't stand being "just a mom and wife" for one more second, so she leaves her young family without so much as a word or a note, finds an apartment near a college in another town and begins her studies again. It's devastating for James and the children who have no idea what happened. Not until three months later when Marilyn faints and realizes she is pregnant with her third child, does she go home resigned to never fulfilling her dreams. The children have been painfully traumatized and all little Lydia can think is that she'll do whatever she has to to make sure her mother never leaves again. She will say yes to anything her mother suggests. Of course, Marilyn comes home and gets the bright idea that if she can't live out her dreams, then Lydia shall! She begins coaching and drilling Lydia at the age of five in Science and Math. Instead of regular birthday gifts, Lydia always gets Biology or Anatomy books. On the flip side, as Lydia gets older, her father tries to keep both her and Nath from being the shy unpopular, unaccepted Asian kid that he was. He constantly talks about how having friends, being accepted, being social, going to school dances is the most important thing. Poor Lydia is doomed from both sides! She and Nath are the only two Asian kids in the high school by the time they get there and neither has any friends. Lydia pretends though...so as not to cause anything in the family that might make her mom leave...Lydia sits on the phone chatting into the dial tone for hours to the friends she doesn't have. I probably don't have to even mention the fact that the third child born, Hannah, was basically ignored by her mother and her father. Lydia was their light! Nath discovers space and the moon and an interest in being an astronaut at a young age (while his mother is gone), and his father is so disappointed that he's not good at sports and that he's more introverted, that he snaps at him to be quiet about that space stuff. Poor Nate. He watches all his life as his parents dote on his younger sister. And, he knows it's tough on Lydia as well...that she can't stand it. Even when Nath gets into Harvard to study aerospace engineering it takes second place to the fact that Lydia has a D in physics. Anyway...the morning that Lydia is discovered missing, and then later dead in the lake, neither of her parents can figure out who in their town would hurt such a gifted, smart, popular girl. The story quickly becomes about how the rest of the family fails to cope, falling apart at the seams, as it pieces together what really happened to Lydia...which is really just a tragic accident. I came away from this story with such a bad taste in my mouth for both of these parents who were each so caught up in their own unrealized dreams that they couldn't see their children just longing for their love right before their eyes! Just a terrible, terrible set of parents. Maybe I shouldn't say that because I know bad things can happen to the best of us, and none of us are perfect parents, but sheesh...they were pretty bad! I picked this book from one of those lists that said," Ten Books to Read if You Liked Gone Girl", lol. I'm just glad to be finally done with it. I can cleanse my pallet and move on!