Have you ever felt like you're acting like someone else to please others? Everything I Never Told You By Celeste Ng is all about that. 

It's  a book about a young girl named Lydia Lee. The book starts off with finding Lydia’s body at the bottom of a lake. But None of her family knows that her body is found yet; they just think Lydia is lost or that she ran away. Throughout the book you go back and forth in time from Lydia's perspective on life and how she ended up in the bottom of a lake, dead.We see her parents and how they met and started their lives together. 

The book itself is very dark and goes into how dysfunctional her family was and how the small town in Ohio where they live viewed her mixed race (American and Chinese) family as abnormal. This helped set the scene for the struggles the kids went through in the book.

This book also has a common theme about being someone who you are not and people setting high standards for you. I think this was a good theme for Ng to put throughout the book and focus on because it helps tie everything together in the end and shares an important message.  In this book we learn about the struggles of being in a mixed race family and how that impacted lydia. We also see the high expectations her parents have put on her to be perfect. And the expectations her parents have made to look like one big happy family. Even though realistically they are not. All this eventually leads up to Lydia's death.

Ng writes with a clear structure of going back and forth in time. However a few of the flashbacks felt unneeded like they were just taking up pages in the book. A few times it was also hard to tell if we were still in a flashback or if the book went back to present time. Most of the time though this book was very hard to put down and stop reading.I really liked the concept of going back in time to see Lydia's family's history and then jumping back to the present to see her side of the story and how she ended up dead in the bottom of a lake.

I also really loved Ng's vibrant details with the way she describes settings and in the book with describing the weather in scenes or scents. It made it very easy to have a visual picture in my head of what was going on in the book. 

She also had really good character development throughout the book. Being able to go back in time and see how the characters started and met each other made really good character development.

Overall I really enjoyed Everything I Never Told You  and would recommend it to anyone looking for their next good book or looking for a deeper message about trying to be yourself.