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Searching for Sylvie Lee

by Jean Kwok

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First published: 2019
Pages: 249

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About this book

Jean Kwok's third novel pivots away from the New York immigrant settings of her earlier books and into the Netherlands. Sylvie Lee, the older, polished, accomplished sister, flies to Amsterdam to visit a dying grandmother and never comes home. Her younger sister Amy, who has spent her whole life looking up to Sylvie, flies out to figure out what happened.

The story unfolds in alternating voices, including the missing woman's, which gives the book its tension. You're learning what happened from the person it happened to, while also watching the people who loved her chase shadows.

Kwok writes about family secrets and class with the same kind of attention she brought to Girl in Translation. The Dutch chapters feel researched but lived in. The ending is divisive but earned.

About the author

Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok draws on movement between languages, countries, and social worlds to shape her family-centered fiction. Born in Hong Kong, she immigrated to New York City at five, worked in a Chinatown clothing factory during childhood, graduated from Harvard, and earned an MFA from Columbia.