But when Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But they don't know this yet." So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family." - Entertainment Weekly "Lydia is dead. The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts "A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense." - O, the Oprah Magazine "Explosive.I savored some lines, and reread them slowly to think about them. The writing itself had some really lovely lines though, so the pure experience of the words added well to it.
Clearly it didn’t stick in my head too much. Nothing in it really blew me away, and unless I knew someone really enjoyed this kind of story I probably wouldn’t be recommending it in general. Ultimately, it was fine at doing what it set out to do (that being a character psychology exploration).
Their grief seems to isolate them, despite that they are all dealing with it. That feeling of being alone, trusting no one, comes up a lot for each of the characters in their own way. This is where the revelations of the “why” come from, as we see the pain and pressure she carried. Told in a dual-timeline, there are flashbacks to when she was alive and we follow her around a bit, get in her head. Feelings are the front-and-center of this story, and not much really happens by way of action.
There’s infidelity, and mistrust, and guilt, and all kinds of things to be excavated from each of their hearts. If it can’t even last a month before I’m struggling to think of main plot points, that’s not a great sign.Īfter thinking about it (and looking at some of my annotations while reading), I’ve remembered that this is a very slow story investigating the way each member of the family handles her death, as well as a very light mystery into the why of her death. Now it’s been about a month since I finished it and I had to sit and think to remember anything of what it was about. If you had asked me if I recommended this book right after I finished reading it, I probably still would have been unenthusiastic, but I would have said yes.
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