Ng's Recipe

Recipes nowadays come in all forms, “Tasty” videos, are some of these many forms. Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never told You is surprisingly similar to such videos. Although Ng’s work is a 297 paged novel and “Tasty” videos are about four minutes, both are recipes that use ingredients to lead their viewers (or readers) to a final product that leaves them entertained and satisfied. Obviously, Celeste Ng is not putting chocolate sauce as a finishing touch on her novel so the two do in fact differ a little bit when it comes to the ingredients used. Instead of eggs and flour, Celeste Ng uses narrative style, word choice and personification as her ingredients to form her recipe for an engaging and evocative read.

Ng’s strategic plot arc within Everything I Never told You is what allows her to be able to hold her

audience’s attention from start to finish.

There is an element of mystery to the novel, “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet” (Ng 1). Having the main character die within the opening lines sparks curiosity in the reader right off the bat. The key is to hold this curiosity and the attention of the reader for the next 296 pages. Ng does this by parceling out information as the novel moves forward, “ Every afternoon, practically, driving around in that Beetle of his, coming home just in time for dinner, when she pretended she’d been at school all the time” (Ng 16). This crumb of information gives readers a hint to what possibly could have happened to Lydia, but it also evokes more questions. Ng does this purposefully; she leads the audience through the novel by revealing something new so the reader has enough information to not be lost, but also not enough information to completely figure it out. She leaves her readers wanting more.
 
This choice to let information slowly drip out instead of flow all at once means that the novel unfolds as a mystery and keeps readers looking to the next page.

Ng uses third person narrative within Everything I Never told You. Because of this it can be difficult to portray how a character is feeling in a specific instance due to the fact that the readers do not have all the thoughts of that character. If the narrator was to point out every thought or feeling of all the characters the readers could easily be bored by the redundancy. Ng uses diction and personification to find a way around just this. Every word choice is methodical and many times she is able to give her readers a plethora of information by introducing just one word, “She drove into the night, homeward, her hair weeping tiny slow streams down her back” (Ng 87). Marilyn's hair obviously can not weep but Ng personifies the hair to give it human qualities and then uses the loaded word weep to portray the mood of the scene. By creating this mood, it evokes emotion from the reader and allows them to feel and connect with the piece.

Ng also uses personification to vividly describe scenery, “She passes a clump of birches, all holding their stiff arms above their heads as if in surrender” (Ng 104). No birch trees have arms, but their personified description gives the reader a clearer insight of the scenery. Personification is also used frequently by Ng to portray character's emotions, “An angry soap froth rises in the drain” (Ng 115). Marilyn and James are in the midst of a major fight and the tensions are high, rather than bluntly stating Marilyn and James’s feelings Ng personifies the soap froth to display them instead.

This mixture of personification, diction and narrative style cause readers to delve into the Ng's novel because they are intrigued by both the plot and the characters whom they can relate to.