Everything I Never Told You by Celeste NG

16-year-old Lydia Lee is dead. Her body is found in a lake near her small Ohio town. Her dad, a Chinese American college professor, her mother, her brother and sister, are sure someone killed her. The police believe it is a suicide.

As the story unfolds, there are multiple layers of family dynamics and small-town 1960's American values as pertains to those 'different' from the norm of white, middle class homogenous citizens.

This is a profoundly moving study of the way families evolve, and the communication, or lack thereof, that leads to sometimes tragic outcomes.



298 pages

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

San Piedro Island, in Puget Sound off the coast of Washington state, is an isolated and insular world in 1954. It has a large Japanese-American population, which was loaded up and hauled away to a prison camp named Manzanar, where they were incarcerated during World War II.  Many of the residents of San Piedro still fear and distrust those who returned.

When Carl Heine, a local fisherman, is found dead in his own gill-net on his boat after a foggy night at sea, the sheriff quickly arrests Kabuo Miyamoto, accusing him of murder despite scant evidence of a crime being committed.  Ishmael Chambers, who owns the island newspaper, covers the trial. Much of the book is seen through his eyes as he remembers growing up on the island.

The novel invokes the sight, the sound, the smell of an island redolent with strawberry farms and cedar trees.  The story itself is a languid, slow-moving tale of people who live a simple life with complex emotions. There is a back story involved for each major character, and those are developed in depth.

I found it to be a compelling book.

 

482 pages