Book Title: Everything I Never Told You

Author: Celeste NG

Chapter 1

Words:

innocuous - a. 1) not intended to offend or upset anyone

                       Sentence: Don't be mad. It's just an innocuous remark.

                   a. 2) not harmful or dangerous

                      Sentence: You think it's innocuous, so you have a go first.

jot down - v. to write sth. quickly

                     Sentence: "I have to leave now", he said, jotting down the phone no. for me.

silhouette - n. 1) the dark outline or shape of a person or an object that you see against a light background - The mountains stood out in silhouette.

                      2) the shape of a person's body or of an object - The dress is fitted to give you a flattering silhouette.

Reading Respons

"Lydia was dead." This is the opening of the story, and a good one. You can't wait to find out more details, like "Who was Lydia?", "Why was she dead?", "Suicide or murder crime?" However, the author didn't reveal any other information on Lydia's death. Actually, her family thought Lydia was just late for breakfast. It was at the end of this chapter that the police found Lydia's body.

From my point of view, this whole chapter is talking about the weird relationship among Lydia's family members. And Lydia was not happy at all, although she is the favorite child in this family.

Evidence from the text

1) Weird relationship

*"Now, your wife also went missing once?"he says,"I remeber the case. In sixty-six, wasn't it?"

Warmth spreads along the back of James's neck, like sweat dripping behind his ears. He is glad, now, that Marilyn is waiting by the phone downstairs. "That was a misunderstanding,"he says stiffly. "A miscommunication between my wife and myself. A family matter."

- Why was the husband happy his wife was not there at that moment? What really happened? (Obviously, it's not just a misunderstanding.)

*Nath doesn't conradict her. He's amazed at the stillness in her face, the way she can lie without even a raised eyebrow to give her away.

- Lydia's brother knew that Lydia had no friends at school. Besides, he knew that Lydia spent all spring with Jack, a so-called 'wild' child. But he mentioned nothing to his parents.

*But now, he knows, she hasn't called Karen or Pam or Jenn in years. He thinks now of those long afternoons, when they'd thought she was staying after school to study. Yawning gaps of time when she could have been anywhere, doing anyhing.

- After calling several Lydia's "friends", her parents realized that Lydia had hid a lot from them.

*A vision of life without her sister in it had flashed across her mind. She would have the good chair at the table, looking out the window at the lilac bushes in the yeard, the big bedroom downstairs near everyone else. At dinnertime, they would pass her the potatoes first. She would get her father's jokes, her brother's secrets, her mother's best smiles.

- Hannah, the youngest one in this family, seeing her sister, Lydia, sneaked away at 2a.m., did nothing but imaging the life without her sister.

2) Lydia was not happy at all in this family

*When he'd picked up the photos at the drugstore, he had regretted capturing this moment, the hard look on his sister's face. But now, he admits, looking at the photgraph in Hannah's hand, this looks like her - at least, the way she looked when he had seen her last.

"Not that one," James says," Not with Lydia making a face like that......."

- No Lydia's pictures in family album showed true happiness. Pathetically, her father said that Lydia was just making a face.

Chapter 2

Words:

stand out (as sth.) - to be much better or more important than sb./sth.

stand out (from/against sth.) - to be easily seen, to be noticeable: 1) The lettering stood out well against the dark background. 2) She's the sort of person who stands out in a crowd.

stay put - if sb./sth. stays put, they continue to be in the place where they are or where they have been put

Reading Response

Marilyn --- Because more than anything, her (Lydia) mother had wanted to stand out. - Why? Because Marilyn's father left them? I am not sure.I think Marilyn's mother was strong, she never complained after her husband abandoned them, and raised her daughter on her own. But she also closed up a lot from Marilyn, like why did her father do that? It seems that the leaving of the father didn't make the mother and daughter more intimate, but distance.

Evidence from text

*"My mother is a home economics teacher," she said. "Betty Crocker is her personal goddess." It was the first thing she had told him about her mother. The way she said it, it sounded like a secret, something she had ket hidden and now deliberatly, trustingly, revealed.

*Years later, Hannah would spy this same mark of deep worry on her mother's face, though she would not know its source, and Marilyn would nver have admitted the resemblance.

James --- Because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. - Why? Because he never felt he belonged here, even though he'd been born on American soil, even though he had never set foot anywhere else. He was an Oriental boy, so he was treated differently by others. Sadly, he even felt ashamed by his idenity and his parents.

Evidence from the text

*Now and then, his father would be called in to loosen a squeaky window, replace a lightbulb, mop up a spill. James, scrunched in the back row, saw his classmates glance from his father to him and knew that they suspected. He would bend his head over his book, so close that his nose nearly touched the page, until his father left the room. By the sedond month, he asked his parents for permission to walk to and from school by himself.

*but when they did family tree projects in class, he pretended to forget the assignment...

*He was afraid to tell Marilyn these things, afraid that once he admitted them, she would see him as he had always seen himself: a scrawny outcast, feeding on scraps, reciting his lines and trying to pass...

*"My parents are both dead," he said, " They died just after I started college."

- From the above text, I am wondering whether James felt relieved or even happy that his parents were dead.

I think both Marilyn and James felt insecure and inferior, although they were all excellent academically. <Everything I never told you>, there is a lot that they 'never told' to each other indeed. And perhaps that's the clue to Lydia's isolated life and death.