Rare is a murder mystery that’s less gripping than a psychodrama about a middle-class family. But the whodunit at the center of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You plays a much-lower-key second fiddle to the twists and turns of mixed-race familial relationships, as they evolve—or refuse to—over the decades. Packed with secrets, lies, and the intolerable weight of expectations, the gorgeously rendered writing of Everything examines the everyday imposter syndrome that plagues parents, both as professionals and people, and their “perfect” children.

The family orbiting around Everything I Never Told You is the Lees: father James, scholar and son of Chinese immigrants; mother Marilyn, an intensely bright mind stifled by the confines of housewifery; overlooked oldest child Nath; socially awkward favored middle child Lydia; and observant youngest daughter Hannah, a child so invisible to her own loved ones, she might as well be a seam in the drywall.

For James, the desire for acceptance, to be treated as anything other than other in his predominantly white community, has been a lifelong struggle. Meanwhile, Marilyn, desperate to not follow in the ponderously old-fashioned footsteps of her mother, wrenches so hard against convention that she winds up falling back on the same path. They both pin their hopes and dreams on Lydia, the fifteen-year-old, blue-eyed, black-haired anomaly of the family.

Subconsciously assuming her more American looks might somehow win her the popularity he never experienced, James pushes his naturally introverted, increasingly withdrawn daughter to make friends and fill her social calendar with empty engagements. On the opposite side, Marilyn all but insists that Lydia, an average student with no clear sense of selfhood, achieve her mother’s dream of medical school and financial independence. The push-pull comes to engulf Lydia’s young, unformed existence. In a scene by the lake that will one day take her life (no spoilers here: Lydia’s death is revealed in the book’s first sentence), she and her brother argue. “She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn’t want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much.”

Ng, a Pushcart Prize winner, has said that it took her six years and four different drafts to hone the story of Everything. The effort shows, with the past-present pingponging plot and each character—from the stoic yet hungry for recognition Nath to bad-boy neighbor Jack—is exquisitely drawn and three-dimensional. In the middle of it all is Lydia, a teenager teetering between the conflicting desires of wanting to be liked and wanting to be “good.” It’s a common girl’s dilemma, and one that sometimes has tragic results.

Everything I Never Told You was released in 2014, but with a series version of Ng’s more recent novel, Little Fires Everywhere, produced by book-club maven Reese Witherspoon, in the works at Hulu, there’s bound to be renewed interest in it—and deservedly so. Certainly Ng doesn’t need the extra publicity from me, a jaded longtime editor who cares less about whether a book has that new-car smell than about its craftsmanship; Everything I Never Told You was a best-of-the-year pick from at least a half-dozen major media outlets. But when I come across a story this beautifully yet unsentimentally told, I can’t help sharing the thrill of discovery. The film rights to the novel were optioned earlier this year, so if you’re a story purist, read it now before Hollywood gets its sticky little fingers all over it.

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