Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Wat ik nooit eerder heb gezegd

This is a beautiful, authentic-feeling story about a seriously messed up family. My heart breaks for every single character even as I want to scream at them in frustration.

Content Warnings

woweewhoa's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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david_slack110507's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I read this book for my A-Level English Literature coursework (as well as reading Wide Sargasso Sea for the coursework element of the course as well) and so I spent the majority of the summer putting nearly all of my reading motivation and progress into reading this book as well as annotating it and tabbing it which is much more than what I do for the other books I read and so hopefully explains the extra long time that the book took for me to read it especially because it is much shorter than my normal books.

In deeply analysing it, I feel like I have only enjoyed the book more because I really like this novel and that's quite shocking because while there is an initial plot of Lydia dying and the family trying to figure out how she died and once learning it was suicide, trying to figure out what drove her to that point and why, there isn't much plot outside of that and is almost entirely reliant on being driven by the characters at play. That's not a bad thing as the characters in the book are incredibly complex and interesting to read about, however, it's just not my usual style of a book as i usually have something plot focused or a mix between plot and character focus, but this didn't disappoint.

As I mentioned, the characters are all really complex and developed starting with the father, James, being ashamed of his Chinese identity and race all of his life, which has meant that all he has ever wanted is to fit in. At the same time, his wife, Marilyn has dreamed of becoming a doctor and standing out as a woman in at the time, a heavily male-dominated profession, but is unable to achieve these dreams as she soon becomes pregnant and has to focus on her family. These unfulfilled dreams of the parents are then pushed onto Lydia, their favourite daughter who they prioritise above everyone else in the family, yet she only wants to conform to what her parents want her to be to make them happy, particularly her mother, leaving Lydia without a fixed identity and having very few people who understand her and her situation. This favouritism then means that the other children, Nath, and in particular, Hannah are ignored not just by their parents but also by each other yet they are also their own characters as Nath is hellbent on escaping the family by going to Harvard despite it meaning that he'll have to leave his sister behind, whilst Hannah almost acts as an observer rather than a person, due to her noticing things when the other characters don't.

This creates a fascinating family dynamic that is explored in both the past, when Lydia was alive, and the present, following her death and we see how the family's attempt to appear normal begins to crack under the pressure and can't handle it anymore. The themes of expectations, belonging and alienation, race, gender roles, and secrets were all really interesting to see throughout the book and it felt like they were all handled really well and carefully too. I also really liked that, while we as the reader can infer why Lydia did what she did, even though it's never explicitly said, the characters are even more in the dark than us due to the divisions that were present in the family leading up to Lydia's death, and so never truly know what happened, giving a sense of reality and realism like so many cases have in which the families don't often get closure nor do they get all the details.

Overall, this was a really fun and interesting book to read that kept me constantly interested and I liked the variety of themes that it covered. The lack of a fixed ending but also having some optimism for the future worked as an ending that didn't cop out and have a happy ending as an easy solution to a really complex storyline and character dynamics.

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angcar's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful sad fast-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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shadfield34's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

There's no hiding it, this is a really sad book. It's a slow builder, dealing with complex themes. The difficulties of a multiracial households in the 70s, parents projecting their unachieved hopes and dreams on their children, the pressure and sadness of being the odd one out at school, the jealous sibling. Just a lot of generational trauma.

Think I might need to read a easy chick lit now 😅

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