Summary: A family reels in shock as a beloved member goes missing and her secrets are slowly exposed.
Rating & Recommendation: 4/5; recommend to anyone who has a deep understanding of complex family dynamics, anyone who has ever been the only Asian in the room.
Review: Ng's debut novel reminds me a lot of The Lovely Bones, with a slightly more interesting story and slightly less impressive writing. Ng really captures the sadness and the listless nature of being trapped by expectation and responsibility. The 70s wasn’t subtle in the way of racial and gender discrimination, and this story paints a rich glimpse of a world in which the Lee family has to fight against so much, including themselves.
The story follows the four family members: a white mother, an Asian father, and two siblings. With regards to the mother, I felt strongly for her plight, being trapped on a path she hadn't planned for herself. With regards to the father, I understood in the core of my being how hard it is to always be the racial minority in a room, always wondering if you belonged in a place dominated by someone else. The parents communicate poorly - with each other, with their children, with their own parents. It's a recipe for resentment and regret, but it takes strong parents to not to do their children what was done to them, and the Lee family is only human.
When it's all said and done, I identified with the daughters - the younger of whom was forgotten and therefore allowed to witness and observe all of the failures and secrets her family was hiding from one another. I identified strongly with the older daughter, who felt betrayed by her brother's success, by his leaving for college, leaving her to fend for herself and to take care of her parents. It's a strange and ironic bitterness, this sort of sibling rivalry, and I hadn't seen my own feelings articulated anywhere before. It's heartbreaking to be abandoned by a sibling when all you're supposed to feel is excitement at his trajectory. It's just not easy when the trajectory is away from you.
Like Little Fires Everywhere, the book is really a series of character studies, which makes the underlying mystery of What happened to Lydia? pretty secondary. But it's less subtle - more pointed its commentary, more in-your-face about race, gender, family.
I might argue that the evolution of Ng's writing shows from the first book to the second, but it doesn't make the debute novel any less enjoyable.
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