It would have been easier if she had insulted James outright, if she had said he was too short or too poor or not accomplished enough. It would have been easier if her mother had used a slur. When Marilyn’s mother, a Southern white single-mother, meets James on the wedding day, she pulls her daughter aside. Their whirlwind romance leads to a shotgun wedding in 1958, in a sly nod to Loving v.
student and Marilyn, who is white, is his student. The couple meets at Harvard, where Chinese American James is a Ph.D. But they don’t know this yet.” Starting from a description of a very ordinary family breakfast, Ng gives us glimpses into the world created by the marriage of Marilyn and James Lee. The story opens with the stark sentence “Lydia is dead. The small Ohio college town in 1977 in which the Lee family lives will feel familiar to any Asian child who grew up in the Midwest. It’s a critique of race in the United States, without sounding shrill or academic. It’s a mystery, without falling into genre. It’s a quick read, without feeling cheap. ‘Everything I Never Told You’ by Celeste Ng: Unspoken Thoughts About Being Mixed-RaceĬeleste Ng’s debut novel Everything I Never Told You: A Novel has been at the top of many best books of 2014 lists - and for good reason.
0 kommentar(er)
