CELESTE NG'S DEBUT NOVEL, "Everything I Never Told You," is a literary thriller that begins with some stock elements: a missing girl, a lake, a local bad boy who was one of the last to see her and won't say what he knows. The year is 1977, the setting, a quiet all-American town in Ohio, where everyone knows one another and nothing like this has ever happened before. This is familiar territory, but Ng returns to it to spin an unfamiliar tale, with a very different kind of girl from the ones we've been asked to follow before. If we know this story, we haven't seen it yet in American fiction, not until now. The missing girl is Lydia Lee, apple of her father's eye, her mother's favorite daughter. A blue-eyed Amerasian Susan Dey, the most white-looking of her siblings in her mixed-race Chinese and white family, she is also so serious, so driven, so good and responsible, she seems the least likely to go missing. The mystery for the reader is not whether Lydia is still alive, or where she's gone - we learn on the first page that Lydia is dead, her body found at the bottom of the lake. We watch instead as the police come to the Lees' home to ask the uncomfortable questions - Was she doing well at school? Who were her friends? Did she seem depressed? Did she ever talk about hurting herself? - and her parents, sister and brother all find themselves unable to answer honestly. The mystery is why they can't bring themselves to tell one another, or the police, what they believe is behind her disappearance. The term literary thriller might make you scoff, but Ng has set two tasks in this novel's doubled heart - to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime. She does both by turning the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of the secrets the family members won't share. Take the moment Marilyn, Lydia's mother, confidently goes to search the diaries she has given her daughter every year for over a decade : "With one finger, she tugs out the last diary: 1977. It will tell her, she thinks. Everything Lydia no longer can. Who she had been seeing. Why she had lied to them. Why she went down to the lake. "The key is missing, but Marilyn jams the tip of a ballpoint into the catch and forces the flimsy lock open. The first page she sees, April 10, is blank. She checks May 2, the night Lydia disappeared. Nothing. Nothing for May 1, or anything in April, or anything in March. Every page is blank. She takes down 1976. 1975. 1974. Page after page of visible, obstinate silence. She leafs backward all the way to the very first diary, 1966: not one word. All those years of her daughter's life, unmarked. Nothing to explain anything." What is Lydia keeping from herself? This is the true conundrum, and we catch a glimpse of it when her father, James, reads an article about his daughter's death: "As one of only two Orientals at Middlewood High - the other being her brother, Nathan - Lee stood out in the halls. However, few seemed to have known her well." James finally starts to see his family as the town does: a living exhibit on the question of whether an Asian man and a white woman should marry, and the children he had hoped would be accepted as third-generation Americans seen instead as immigrants at birth, arriving from an America his neighbors can't yet imagine is possible. Ng has structured "Everything I Never Told You" so we shift between the family's theories and Lydia's own story, and what led to her disappearance and death, moving toward the final, devastating conclusion. What emerges is a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle. This is, in the end, a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind - a burden you do not always survive. ALEXANDER CHEE'S latest novel, "The Queen of the Night," will be published in 2015.

Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parentsblonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor Jamesolder brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydiaa promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother, Nathto slip away from home and venture out in a rowboat late at night when she had always been deathly afraid of water, refusing to learn to swim? The surprising answers lie deep beneath the surface, and Ng, whose stories have won awards including the Pushcart Prize, keeps an admirable grip on the narrative's many strands as she expertly explores and exposes the Lee family's secrets: the dreams that have given way to disappointment; the unspoken insecurities, betrayals and yearnings; the myriad ways the Lees have failed to understand one another and, perhaps, themselves. These long-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page.Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In the aftermath of 16-year-old Lydia Lee's death in 1977, the other members of the Lee family come apart and together as they reflect on their lives with and without her. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Ng's debut is one of those aching stories about which the reader knows so much more than any of the characters, even as each yearns for the unknowable truth. "Lydia is dead," the novel opens-blunt, unnerving, devastating. She's only 16, the middle of three children of James and Marilyn Lee, a mixed-race couple married years before the ironically named Loving v. Virginia finally invalidated U.S. antimiscegenation laws in 1967. They're initially drawn together by their differences: James, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants, finishing his Harvard PhD; Marilyn, the only Radcliffe undergraduate determined to become a doctor, a gifted scientist among unbelieving men. When they bury their daughter in 1977, the Lee family-already fragile before the tragedy-implodes. James detaches, Marilyn seeks refuge, brother Nath blames, and youngest Hannah silently watches all. Each will search for a Lydia who doesn't exist, desperate to parse what happened. -VERDICT Ng constructs a mesmerizing narrative that shrinks enormous issues of race, prejudice, identity, and gender into the miniaturist dynamics of a single family. A breathtaking triumph, reminiscent of prophetic debuts by Ha Jin, Chang-rae Lee, and -Chimamanda Adichie, whose first titles matured into spectacular, continuing literary legacies. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This emotionally involving debut novel explores themes of belonging using the story of the death of a teenage girl, Lydia, from a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio. Lydia is the middle and favorite child of Marilyn Walker, a white Virginian, and James Lee, a first-generation Chinese-American. Marilyn and James meet in 1957, when she is a premed at Radcliffe and he, a graduate student, is teaching one of her classes. The two fall in love and marry, over the objections of Marilyn's mother, whose comment on their interracial relationship is succinct: "It's not right." Marilyn gets pregnant and gives up her dream of becoming a doctor, devoting her life instead to raising Lydia and the couple's other two children, Nathan and Hannah. Then Marilyn abruptly moves out of their suburban Ohio home to go back to school, only to return before long. When Lydia is discovered dead in a nearby lake, the family begins to fall apart. As the police try to decipher the mystery of Lydia's death, her family realize that they didn't know her at all. Lydia is remarkably imagined, her unhappy teenage life crafted without an ounce of cliche. Ng's prose is precise and sensitive, her characters richly drawn. Agent: Julie Barer, Barer Literary. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* A teenage girl goes missing and is later found to have drowned in a nearby lake, and suddenly a once tight-knit family unravels in unexpected ways. As the daughter of a college professor and his stay-at-home wife in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, Lydia Lee is already unwittingly part of the greater societal changes going on all around her. But Lydia suffers from pressure that has nothing to do with tuning out and turning on. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting. Her mother is white, and their interracial marriage raises eyebrows and some intrusive charges of miscegenation. More troubling, however, is her mother's frustration at having given up medical school for motherhood, and how she blindly and selfishly insists that Lydia follow her road not taken. The cracks in Lydia's perfect-daughter foundation grow slowly but erupt suddenly and tragically, and her death threatens to destroy her parents and deeply scar her siblings. Tantalizingly thrilling, Ng's emotionally complex debut novel captures the tension between cultures and generations with the deft touch of a seasoned writer. Ng will be one to watch.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist