The first order of books arrived only 3 weeks after I placed the order. Considering the hole in the ground country I live in, I was impressed with their speed. (They boast an 8-10 work days delivery within Europe, but I knew there was no way that was gonna happen. Southeast Europe might as well be on Mars.) My hands were shaking as I took the books into my hands for the first time, I kid you not. I was beyond excited. I have placed a second, a third and a fourth order since then. The second one has arrived and I'm expecting the others within the next 10 days. I may have become obsessed and have been spending all my money on books. Alas...

But, now to bring the spotlight onto this particular book. This novel. This goddamn novel. Man, I was so, so impressed. I love stories that deal with family dynamics and histories, as well as those that explore the past decisions and incidents in order to figure out how the hell did we get here? Now, the family saga aspect excludes Russian writers (I could not finish a single Russian classic back in school, I hated how long winded they were and they all sounded pretentious to me. I hated them. Though I was recently thinking of buying the Penguin Russian classics from BD, maybe I will like them more now, having grown up and all.) Anyway, back to Everything. This brilliant book might have hit me in the chest and shouted 'bull's eye' because I have lived through some of it. This to me read as a 'how-not-to-raise-kids' manual. All the mistakes, though some are well-meaning, the parents make when bringing up their children are here. These parents made them, with devastating consequences.

I am most fascinated by the parents here. Marilyn in particular. She was different. She wanted to be different. In a time when women's place was thought to be in the kitchen, she wanted to be a doctor. Her mother told her to "find a nice Harvard man" to marry (why waste time studying in college, right?), but she wanted to rise above that. Enter James. He was teaching a seminar on cowboys that Marilyn had sighed up for. After the first class, she went to his office and kissed him. Things snowballed from there.This seems like a nice romantic story, but it is not. See, these two people were fundamentally different. 

James, a man of Chinese descent, whose parents came to the US illegally, always tried to blend in. He hated being different, he hated the looks, the whispers, he hated when people asked him about the difference between various food choices in Chinese restaurants, he hated when they pulled the sides of their eyes back to remind him that he, despite having been born on American soil, is not an American. So, he did everything he could to make himself as American as possible. He shunned his parents, he stopped speaking Chinese, he studied (and taught) about cowboys (the most American subject he could think of) and he fell in love with and married the stereotypical American girl.

Marilyn, the blonde, blue-eyed American girl, always wanted to stand out. She hated being stereotyped, she hated how limited her options were just because she wanted to be more than a housewife. Her assumption was that she was so different in her dreams, as if no other woman at the time wanted more, as if they were all satisfied with their lot, she felt like she was a rebel of some sort. She shunned her mother and went to study medicine. She was going to be a doctor and nobody could tell her otherwise. And at Harvard she met a man who was smart, and elegant, and different than all the man who had courted her back home. He stood out. And so she fell in love with and married a man most people would deny being American.

These two people then had kids: Nath, who looked like his father, and Lydia, who looked like her mother. Both doted on Lydia, of course, the blue-eyed angel. They were living in Middlewood, Ohio, when Marilyn's mother died. After looking at what little remained of her mother, and only taking and old Betty Crocker cookbook to remember her by, she re-examines her life and decides that she still has time to realize her dreams. So, she enrolls in classes at a college in a nearby town and, deciding against giving any explanation, she leaves her family behind. She later returns after she find out that she is pregnant with Hannah, but the summer she was absent defined the rest of all of their lives.

The three children all know their place in the family. 

Nath is just there. He is brilliant and is guided, and comforted, by his interest in astronauts. He's wanted to be one ever since that summer. His dream is to go MIT or Carnegie Mellon or Caltech - but he also knows that "there was only one place his father would approve: Harvard. To James, anything else was a failing." He longs for freedom, he cannot wait to get away from his family and finally start living his life. 

Lydia, the aforementioned family favorite, is actually completely lost. She buckled under the pressure of her parents' dreams, everything she did "seemed such a small thing to trade for their happiness", and she has lost all sense of self. Her mother's bragging about how she was going to be a doctor grated on her nerves, but she bore it because she made a promise that fateful summer. 

Hannah is invisible. Even when she was a baby "they set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept". People often tend to forget about her. She hides in the nooks and crannies of the house and there is an unmistakable air of 'not wanted' around her. The sibling relationships are complicated and messed up as they are all jealous of one another.

In a nutshell, this family is a mess and it all stems from their parents. They were not satisfied with who they were and so, in chasing what they wanted (and they wanted the wrong things) they made so many mistakes, so many missteps. 

I will leave you here and recommend you find out what exactly happened to Lydia, and why, and how everyone contributed to the tragedy that shook this family so deeply.