#ReadDiverseLit Post for "Book with a main character who is mixed race"

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, 6:30 in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. 

These are the first lines of Everything I Never Told You, a novel, by Celeste Ng. It's written in a shifting third person, a pov I don't read much, and tells the story of a missing (dead) high school girl. By hovering over the thoughts of her parents and siblings in this shifting, but close, third person, the reader sees events from many different perspectives. Ng writes lovely sentences and her plot kept me turning the pages.

What really set this book apart for me, though, is that it's the story of a mixed-race marriage and of mixed-race children. These are the kinds of books I write as a mixed author, but I haven't had the opportunity to read very many of them. Wait. I haven't read any novels like this. And the few books I have read are about the black/white mixed-race experience: The Color of Water, by James McBride, Caucasia by Danzy Senna, and Dreams of My Father by Barrack Obama.

Everything I Never Told You is a truly Asian-American novel, revealing some of the loneliness of what it is to be an outsider in small-town America, something I know quite well.

So, in addition to Everything I Never Told You and the books mentioned above, I have to recommend Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies for people looking to read more about from mixed race characters. Apparently, there aren't too many book likes this out there!