![]() ![]() Nath and Lydia are close in age, and they form a bond, but once Nath gets into Harvard, he is focused completely upon leaving and neglects his sister. They don’t see the two younger children, Nath and Hannah, either: both are so focused on Lydia that they neglect them. She plays up to them, and both parents so desperately want her to live their dreams that they never stop to see who she really is. James and Marilyn both imagine Lydia to be popular at school, brilliant in physics, when she is neither of those things. There is another absence in this book-the absence of any real attempt to truly understand the people who are the closest. So both parents pour all their thwarted dreams onto Lydia without stopping to think what Lydia really wants. Children and marriage put an end to those ambitions. But Marilyn is also a misfit in her way: she had ambitious about becoming a doctor at a time when women doctors were thin on the ground. Like his blonde, blue-eyed wife, Marilyn. He desperately wants to fit in and be like everyone else. James is Chinese-American, living in a small town in Ohio, where at the time, he was the only “oriental”. ![]() To her parents, Marilyn and James, Lydia was everything they weren’t. It’s a story about a family, flawed in the way families are, trying to make sense of the world around them. ![]() Although there is a mystery to her death, this is not a whodunit. ![]() So begins a book about a family with an absence at its heart-that of the oldest daughter who dies just before her 16th birthday. ![]()
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