Jean Kwok: Searching for Sylvie Lee, William Morrow, 9780062834300, hardback (available as E-book), pub date: June 4th, 2019

(No German edition announced yet)

 Jean Kwok’s “Girl in Translation” was one of these words by mouth bestsellers hitting the New York Times bestseller list when it was published by Penguin US several years ago. It narrates the fate of a very gifted Hong Kong immigrant student and her family slaving away in the sweat shops of the New York textile industry. I loved it; the book has since been adopted into many school reading programs.
 

In Jean’s latest work “Searching for Sylvie Lee” her same unique voice stands out describing the struggles of a Chinese Hong Kong family in the US but this time with a mystery at the heart of the story, set in the Netherlands and New York, giving it an international background and special twist. Jean’s own personal history makes these two books so very authentic; they are a joy to read. I really got sucked into “Searching for Sylvie Lee”; it is a perfect page turner and summer read, an emotional story with a serious subject, family secrets and a captivating mystery with a fascinating ending. It is hardly surprising it has been nominated by many magazines as one of the most anticipated books of 2019.  

The drama of their lives unfolds gradually as we listen to the three voices of the Lee women in “Searching for Sylvie Lee”:  Sylvie Lee, the successful, ambitious, responsible oldest daughter of the Lee family, her younger, more easygoing beautiful sister Amy and their mother, “Ma”, a woman very much brought up and caught in the old Chinese tradition.  Sylvie had to spent part of her childhood with her remote family and grandmother in the Netherlands as her parents had to work long hours in their newly adopted country. When she gets a call and learns that her beloved grandmother is dying, she flies to the Netherlands, her true emotional home but after initial daily contact with her family in the US, she suddenly vanishes.  Amy knows her responsible sister would never disappear without telling them and fears something tragic happened to her sister. She takes the next flight to Amsterdam. Having always been the shy one, she finds a new determination in trying to recover the steps of her sister’s life and the people she met when she arrived in the Netherlands.   Amy soon discovers that her sister’s life was less perfect than she led her family to believe  with some of her relatives in the Netherlands behaving strangely.

I will not be a spoil sport and tell you more, you will just have to go out and buy the book! Enjoy!