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    Searching for Sylvie Lee: A Novel
    Searching for Sylvie Lee: A Novel
    Searching for Sylvie Lee: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    Searching for Sylvie Lee: A Novel

    Written by Jean Kwok

    Narrated by Angela Lin, Samantha Quan and Caroline McLaughlin

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

    A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick & Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick!

    NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY New York Times • Time • Marie Claire • Elle • Buzzfeed • Huffington Post • Good Housekeeping • The Week • Goodreads • New York Post • and many more!

    “Powerful . . . A twisting tale of love, loss, and dark family secrets.”  — Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water

    A poignant and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties binding three women—two sisters and their mother—in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge, from the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Translation

    It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother—and then vanishes.

    Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn’t rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love.

    But what happened to Sylvie? Amy and her parents are distraught and desperate for answers. Sylvie has always looked out for them. Now, it’s Amy’s turn to help. Terrified yet determined, Amy retraces her sister’s movements, flying to the last place Sylvie was seen. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something much more valuable: the truth. Sylvie, the golden girl, kept painful secrets . . . secrets that will reveal more about Amy’s complicated family—and herself—than she ever could have imagined.

    A deeply moving story of family, secrets, identity, and longing, Searching for Sylvie Lee is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive portrait of an immigrant family. It is a profound exploration of the many ways culture and language can divide us and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone—especially those we love.

    “This is a true beach read! You can’t put it down!” – Jenna Bush Hager, Today Show Book Club Pick

    This audiobook includes an episode of the Book Club Girl Podcast, featuring an interview with Jean Kwok about Searching for Sylvie Lee.

    Editor's Note

    Book club pick…

    TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager selected this mystery about a family trip that goes horribly wrong when a sibling goes missing as her June #ReadWithJenna pick. Hager said in the announcement on TODAY, “Any of us can imagine if our sister or our best friend went missing. Amy is searching for her sister and the sisterhood is I think the most beautiful part of it.” Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss also selected it for the Belletrist Book Club June pick.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 4, 2019
    ISBN9780062933317
    Searching for Sylvie Lee: A Novel
    Author

    Jean Kwok

    Jean Kwok is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee, Girl in Translation, and Mambo in Chinatown. Her work has been published in twenty countries and is taught in universities, colleges, and high schools across the world. She has been selected for numerous honors, including the American Library Association Alex Award, the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award, and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award international shortlist. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and earned an MFA from Columbia University. She is fluent in Chinese, Dutch, and English, and divides her time between the Netherlands and New York City.

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    Reviews for Searching for Sylvie Lee

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    • 5/5
      This was almost unbearably sad. The central mystery (where is Sylvie?) was very well done. I was drawn in right from the start and wanted to listen every free moment because I needed to know! No spoilers- In the end what happened was not at all what I thought. There were plenty of red herrings and possible suspects who wanted Sylvie gone and it threw me off track. This isn't really a thriller or a fast-paced suspense story. It's more of an exploration of a family and the complicated relationships of it's members and all of their secrets, and there are a lot of secrets. It's a slow, languid story that flows like water but there are always hints that things could get dark.

      The narration was excellent. There are several accents and languages and it all sounded authentic to me. I could always tell which character was speaking by voice alone. It's a great story for audio and I recommend this one highly.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Whoaaa, this book was intense. Although it wasn’t a “perfect” book, it was gripping and would 10/10 recommend.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Searching for Sylvie Lee was a beautifully written story of two sisters, culture, immigration, generational differences, and family conflict and secrets. When Sylvie goes missing, Amy must confront their differences in order to discover the truth.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed learning about life in the Netherlands. It was a unique story. A few of the middle chapters were a bit slow but overall worthwhile read.
    • 4/5
      A bit long winded and slow moving but worth the 'wait'.
    • 5/5
      It was captivating from start to finish The story came alive while I listened intently
    • 1/5
      This was one of the most excruciating books I've listened to in years. The narrator took an already overly depressing character to the grave for me. It was such a loss for me.
    • 5/5
      Dysfunctional Family Drama? Mystery? Cultural exploration? Searching for Sylvie Lee is all of these and more. Even though I guessed some of the major secrets, I was still engaged and fascinated by the story and the lives of these characters. I listened to the audio book which included three narrators (Sylvie, Amy, Ma). I empathized with all the characters (major and mInor) and wished their lives could have been different. (Not really a spoiler) but no happily ever after - just an engaging and engrossing story.
    • 3/5
      There’s a lot not to like in this book. None of the characters are really likable, the structure makes it hard to follow the story, the use of idioms from three languages – while an interesting technique – is frequently jarring, and anyone who doesn’t see The Big Reveal coming from the first few chapters hasn’t been paying attention.Other than that….“Searching for Sylvia Lee” is essentially a mystery story. What happened to Sylvia, who had traveled from her New York home to Holland, to see her dying grandmother for the last time? Her family in America is told she got on her homebound flight, after which she simply vanishes. Her younger sister, Amy, travels to Holland to find the answers. That Dutch authorities, when they are finally contacted, are unwilling to force the airlines to reveal whether or not Sylvia boarded, or to lean on her credit card companies for records of her purchases to help trace her movements, seems incomprehensible to the American reader. And the question of appealing to the American Embassy for help – Sylvia has joint American and Dutch citizenship – is never raised. It is, of course, the author’s choice to withhold certain bits of information in novels of this genre, but there is normally a token gesture explaining why the characters didn’t take the most direct route to solving the mystery.The narration jumps not only from character to character, but through time. We get bits of information from Ma, from Sylvia, and from Amy, bouncing back and forth over decades. Through it, we learn that Ma is a doormat, Pa is resentful, Sylvia is a liar, Sylvia’s soon-to-be ex-husband is a cheater and a bully, Amy is a dingbat, cousin Helena is a bitch, and her husband Willem is spineless. The reader may be forgiven for wondering if it’s worthwhile to wade through the verbiage to get at the family secrets simmering under the mystery of Sylvia’s disappearance.Once The Big Reveal is made, the why and how is quickly wrapped up, and it’s probably not going to be what the reader expected, though it makes sense within the structure of the story.Kwok has taken a big chance here with the narrative style, and it just doesn’t quite come off. Ma and Pa emigrated from China to America; Helena and Willem from China to Holland. So the characters, among them, speak Chinese, Dutch, and English. Most speak two languages, only Sylvia speaks all three, and Amy is pretty much limited to English only. As each takes their narrative turn, the sentence structure and idioms used are representative of that character’s native tongue. It’s an interesting idea, and reinforces the lack of honest communication among the characters, but it can be jarring to read phrases like “it began to rain cow tails” or “the in-breaker was surprised”.“Searching for Sylvia Lee” is not throw-it-across-the-room bad. But it really doesn’t have much going for it to raise it above the current crop of vanished-woman tales.
    • 2/5
      Although interesting at times, I had a lot of problems with Jean Kwok’s Searching for Sylvie Lee—from the writing to the plot and a lot of other things in between. Part mystery, part family saga, Searching tells two main stories in alternating chapters—Amy desperately trying to find her sister, Sylvie, and flashbacks to Sylvie. The narrative took turns simultaneously predictable and absurd, and Kwok never took the time to develop any of the characters past their banal surface. The mother’s voice, sprinkled amidst the chapters, felt so painfully cliched to me I could hardly read the sections. On the plus side, Kwok does a beautiful job of describing the Netherlands and makes it a better character than anyone else. By the half-way point, there is a page-turning aspect to the novel that pulled me to the end, but not happily. All in all, Searching for Sylvie Lee was a big miss for me.
    • 1/5
      Books about family secrets tend very much to not be my jam, and this one was no exception. I found the twists to be unconvincing and bathetic, and I found myself shouting out loud as they were revealed. I think fans of Gone Girl and Everything I Never Told You will like this book, but I was not that person.
    • 3/5
      more like 2.5 Didn't love this. I felt like it couldn't decide what it wanted to be: chick lit travel with intention like Where'd You Go, Bernadette? or dark whodunnit mystery - with everyone a suspect in Sylvie's disappearance - the evidence continued to pile up with odd revelations and twists that seemed like a "duh" for the professionals investigating the case. Amy is Sylvie's younger sister and is so in her shadow - she is afraid of her own shadow! Still living at home in a small NYC apt. with her Chinese immigrant parents, she "can't" complete her degree, "can't" travel, can't seem to accomplish much that an adult needs to without Sylvie's guidance. Now that she is missing, Amy has to step up. She flies to the Netherlands where Sylvie was last seen when she went to attend her beloved Grandmother's deathbed. The family (Uncle Wilhelm, Aunt Helena, cousin Lukas) that greet her there are enigmas and surprisedly unconcerned with Sylvie's disappearance. There are all sorts of weird vibes that Amy tries to understand and sort out - but she is just one part of the story. Sylvie has a voice and individual chapters leading up to the date she went missing and filling in some of the back story. Ma, back home in NYC also gets her say - mostly in response to what Amy reports back by phone. There are layers of complexity with some of Sylvie's acquaintances there: Philip the cello instructor who hits on Amy without revealing he knew Sylvie, Estelle Sylvie's best friend from her childhood years of living there, and then red herrings from back home: Sylvie's marriage is in shambles (nobody knew!) and her husband Jim has an abusive streak and she was fired from her high powered consultant position despite her Ivy League credentials and drive to succeed. Ugh. It all just gets heaped on. Sylvie's regret at wearing a "mask" all these years gets tiresome, as does Amy's simpering and nervousness about basic human interactions; when she does get "tough" and take a stand, it rings false. The book almost felt like a translation - the language was so stilted and awkward - it makes sense from Ma and her immigrant English, but not from anyone else. I did enjoy the descriptions of the Netherlands - food and customs and landscape, but the ending was rather unsatisfactory and way too drawn out. I couldn't find anyone to root for.
    • 4/5
      Quick and easy read! Although the ending was predictable the story pulled you in begging you to keep reading. I enjoyed the author adding in some of the cultural differences that the main characters dealt with. Overall a good book!
    • 4/5
      Great until the end. Lots of suspense. Many theories of what may have happened. A few twists along the way. The family connections were interesting and compelling to read. I just didn't like the end.
    • 4/5
      A special thank you to LibraryThing Early Reviewers and William Morrow for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.Kwok's latest work begins with a mystery. The oldest Lee daughter, Sylvie, vanishes while on a trip to the Netherlands where she was visiting with her dying grandmother one last time.Amy is the shy and sheltered baby of the Lee family who has always looked up to her sister. Sylvie fiercely loves her little sister even though she is seven years younger and they weren't raised together. She was raised in the Netherlands by her grandmother because her new immigrated parents were too poor. That choice weighed heavily on Sylvie's parents, even after she had returned.Deeply distraught and wracked with grief, the Lees want answers as to what happened to their daughter. Amy visits the last place that Sylvie was seen alive, and instead of uncovering answers, she learns of hidden secrets that speak to their complicated and delicate family dynamic.Searching for Sylvie Lee is a portrait of an immigrant family and an exploration of cultural constraints —even within the same family. Throughout the book, there is an overarching theme of loss as well as the high cost of keeping secrets.Told by Amy, Sylvie, and their mother, the narrative shifts back and forth in time. The woman reveal the emotions that they've been hiding as well as the truths that they have been guarding with the fear of being found out. Each character is thinking in their native tongues of English, Dutch, and Chinese—the distinctive voices, culture, and language shield each character.There is a tremendous amount of growth for Amy. She must overcome her crippling shyness in order to find her sister. A sister she is realizing that she actually knows little about. It is here where Kwok excels. Her writing has incredible purpose where Amy is concerned and it is some of the best in the book.My only issue was with the pacing of the book—I did find it slow overall, and that the narrative kept stalling because of too many flashbacks. That being said, this is an incredibly thoughtful and beautifully written book. There is such an innate and ingrained sadness to Kwok's words. If you do enjoy more of a literary type thriller, than I would definitely recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      I received this book from Library Thing early reviewers. The book seems to be billed as a mystery, but in fact it is much more. Yes, Sylvie is missing, but the layers of family history and secrets are far more compelling. And the descriptions of the status and experiences of immigrants in both New York and the Netherlands are really well done. Stay away from the reviews which include spoiler alerts...to give away the answer to the disappearance and the reasons behind it will ruin the story for you. (Not sure why reviewers feel the need to do that.) generally a well written and interesting book.
    • 4/5
      This novel begins with a Willa Cather quote reflecting the main theme of the story: “The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.”Amy Lee, 26, travels from Queens, New York to the suburbs of Amsterdam in the Netherlands after her older sister Sylvie goes missing. Sylvie had lived in the Netherlands until she was nine with their Grandma and their cousins, the Tan family, because her young immigrant parents in New York could not afford to support her. Sylvie recently went back to the Netherlands when she heard her beloved Grandma was dying. Then Sylvie disappeared.Amy has always idolized Sylvie: “Often there’s a dichotomy between the beautiful sister and the smart one, but in our family, both of those qualities belong to my sister. And me, I am only a shadow, an afterthought, a faltering echo.”Ironically, we learn in the chapters narrated alternately by Amy, Sylvie, and Ma, that Sylvie felt the same way about Amy. As much as the sisters love each other, each doesn’t really know who the other is, nor what is in her heart. Nor do they really see behind the facades of others in their family. There were a number of barriers to transparency in their lives. As with many immigrant families, the younger generation spoke a different language. Amy’s native language was English and Sylvie’s was Dutch, while Ma continued to speak primarily in Chinese. Not only were their languages different; all three of them grew up in different cultures. The daughters also experienced tension between, on the one hand, the culture at school and work, and on the other, the culture their parents inculcated at home. This split seemed especially salient for them because both in the U.S. and in the Netherlands, Amy and Sylvie had been taunted and bullied for being Asian. All of this encouraged them to keep their heads low and remain apart from others: the effects were long-lasting. For Sylvie it meant developing a persona that was “acceptable” for someone of a minority race (although, as she found, it was never really acceptable not to be white). But after a while, even Sylvie didn’t know who she was anymore. Sylvie also discovered she didn’t even know her own husband, Jim. When she came to see him as Amy did, she realized “In love and life, we never know when we are telling ourselves stories. We are the ultimate unreliable narrators.” Or as Billy Joel said in his lyrics for "The Stranger": "Why were you so surprisedThat you never saw the strangerDid you ever let your loverSee the stranger in yourself…"Some of the secrets everyone is harboring do eventually come to light however, and we finally learn what happened to Sylvie. An epilogue eight months later ties up loose ends. As Amy muses:“How my knowledge of Sylvie, and Ma, of myself has changed. We had all been hidden behind the curtain of language and culture: from each other, from ourselves. I have learned that though the curtains in the Netherlands are always open, there is much that can be concealed in broad daylight. . . . The truth is, it is impossible to hide from yourself. Another truth: it is possible to find yourself anywhere.”Discussion: I tend to concur with the view promulgated by Benjamin Dreyer, Random House Copy Chief, in his recent book Dreyer’s English. He advocates judicious and sparing use of dialect. For example, non-English speakers think in their native language, not in broken English. In this book, the author has Ma thinking in broken English rather than in a grammatical version of her native Chinese. Evaluation: I liked this very moving story, although I wasn’t as impressed with the writing as I had been with Kwok’s previous two books. I would still recommend it - the author offers wonderful insights in all of her work into the perils and promises of immigration, and the acculturation challenges for all involved.
    • 4/5
      Although superficially, this story might get tagged as a mystery, it's really a story about family dynamics, and especially family secrets. Sylvie, the perfect older daughter of a Chinese American family, goes missing in the Netherlands and it's up to her younger sister Amy to try and find her. The story alternates between Amy's and Sylvie's point of view and often recounts the same situation but through completely different eyes. What unfolds is a complicated intertwined mess of family relationships and secrets. I thought the setting in the Netherlands was especially fascinating and vividly portrayed.
    • 5/5
      Here's a multi-narrator, suspenseful domestic thriller set in Amsterdam, featuring a fractured Chinese-American family. Amy is searching for her elder sister Sylvie, who disappeared after returning to Holland to see their dying grandmother. Sylvie was raised by her aunt and uncle in Amsterdam until she was nine, due to the financial struggles of her parents, who were just getting launched in New York City after emigrating from China. Sylvie, on the surface successful in marriage and career, is really yearning to return to Europe and especially to see her cousin Lukas, her childhood companion. The voices of Amy, Sylvie, and their mother, all owning disparate pieces of the puzzle of Sylvie, are dramatic and sympathetic, and there are excellent secondary character as well. A fine, suspenseful novel.Quotes: "Ma is delicate and yielding, like a coconut rice ball. Sylvie is all long limbs and sharp edges, more of a broadsword saber.""If you do not speak, no one will ever hear you."
    • 4/5
      Sylvie Lee, the eldest daughter of a Chinese immigrant family, mysteriously disappears, and her younger sister Amy begins a search for her in The Netherlands, where Sylvie was visiting her dying grandmother.This story, told in flashbacks by the three main characters, is about complicated family relationships and family secrets, and there turned out to be many more secrets than just how Sylvie disappeared. Interesting to me were the cultural differences this Chinese family had to overcome, both in the United States and in The Netherlands.
    • 3/5
      Successful Sylvie disappears, shy Amy goes to find her sister. Great storytelling, one gets absorbed in the book, but not a memorable story. And somewhat lacking as a mystery. While many characters were portrayed as suspects, the denouement was well hinted at and not particularly satisfying. The author made a good point that people's motives aren't always what they seem and character has many influences. I was surprised that while protesting the racism directed at Asians, the author was quite willing to portray other nationalities with generalities of thought and/or behavior.
    • 4/5
      Jean Kwok’s latest novel is rueful, richly detailed and often harrowing as we follow three women; the mother, the younger sister - Amy, and Sylvie Lee, the missing beautiful and successful older daughter.The title is the first hint that there is more to the storyline than just a “disappearance”. As a mindful writer, Kwok makes her point in a deliberate and quietly suspenseful style.At the beginning this storyline was a slow burn but by the end this book was definitely worth the wait as the puzzles presented by unreliable narrators intertwine in a seamless way. I often wondered as withheld secrets were eluded or contradicted who was telling the truth.A deliberate and suspenseful tale spiked with themes of cultural identity, cultural expectations and the differing views of immigration on generations within a family.This book is a terrific pick for book clubs as it showcases how memory become story and thus a form of immortality.
    • 5/5
      What a beautiful book, filled with enormous love and grief. This copy is going into my antique bookcare to be treasured, always.
    • 3/5
      It is so hard to figure out why a book will resonate so greatly with some, and not others. This book is a case in point, it has garnered some terrific reviews, but there were some plot points that were for me, not realistic. A young Chinese woman disappears after returning to the Netherlands, when the grandmother that helped raise her, was dying. Although her parents lived in the United States, Sylvie herself lived in the Netherlands for her first nine years. Her younger sister, Amy, who thinks Sylvie perfect, flies to the Netherlands to find out what happened to her sister.In alternating chapters we hear from Amy, Sylvie herself and their mother. Changing views of Sylvie are revealed from her own words. There are many family secrets, and a suspected hidden treasures passed down from mother to daughter. Jealousy, and its ill effects, an ugliness that spreads. The struggle for immigrants to assimilate. Yet, I had trouble connecting to the characters. We do find out what happened to Sylvie and why, though I didn't feel I was given enough reasons to find the ending credible.
    • 4/5
      Searching for Sylvie Lee was a beautifully written story of two sisters, culture, immigration, generational differences, and family conflict and secrets. When Sylvie goes missing, Amy must confront their differences in order to discover the truth.
    • 4/5
      A quick paced novel, Searching for Sylvie Lee kept me interested throughout its entirety. It’s not the most original book, but the characters are believable and I enjoyed the differences presented on how one views oneself vs how others perceive you.
    • 5/5
      Searching for Sylvie Lee is so many things woven together into one book: a mystery dealing with relationships, immigration, families, cultures, secrets, and so much more. I absolutely love this book. It’s a beautifully written, thought-provoking novel that will fill you with so many emotions. “It is a profound exploration of the many ways culture and language can divide us and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone—especially those we love.”Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.
    • 2/5
      Searching For Sylvie Lee, Jean KwokThis novel proceeds in the voices of the three major female characters, Sylvie, her sister Amy, and Ma, the mother of both. The story unfolds as their memories are very slowly related to the reader. There are buried family secrets which will ultimately determine the outcome of the book. The narrative felt drawn out and proceeded too slowly for me. It took me weeks and weeks to finish this novel. It traveled in many directions which did not draw me in immediately. At first I thought it was a murder mystery, than a romance novel, than a story about family secrets, then about unrequited love, then about the experience of the immigrant, then about interracial marriages, then about alternate sexuality, then about infidelity, then about race, and even more tangential issues. In essence, it was a novel that attempted to subtly present the progressive agenda, but it became heavy handed instead! There were too many diversions, none of which were fully developed before the tale danced off in another direction. When the Lees emigrated from China to America, “the beautiful country”, they decided to temporarily send their daughter Sylvie to live with relatives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Helena and Wilhem Tan had also emigrated from China. They were financially better off and operated their own restaurant. Once on their feet, the Lees hoped to retrieve Sylvie. The Tans had a son Lucas, who was the same age as Sylvie so she would have a friend. The Tans did not practice the old ways of China, however, while the Lees continued to do so. Therefore Sylvie is raised far differently than her sister Amy, born in America while she was in Holland. Also, for some reason, Helena disliked Sylvie and mistreated her. Ma’s mother also lived with the Tans, and she is the person who is kind to Sylvie and who really raises her during her time there. The book stresses the difficulties of living as immigrants and as people who are not white, in a foreign country, and this is emphasized through the experiences of both families as they move through their lives.As each of the important characters dealt with their experiences, in their own unique way, it sometimes got repetitious and tedious. Each suffered from their own emotional issues. Ma had always felt guilty and insecure about her life and the choices she made. She never truly adjusted to American ways and did not speak the language well. Sylvie felt cheated and abused, unloved and insecure, because she had been sent away to live with relatives. One of her eyes had a defect, and she had a protruding tooth. In addition to being Chinese and extremely different in a place like Amsterdam, those physical issues caused her to be bullied. She retreated into a shell and was determined to prove her worth by being the best in school and at work, but she was never fully accepted by others. She kept her distance from others and was perceived as cold, thus she always felt like, and was treated as, an outsider. Amy was born in America while Sylvie was in Europe. She had her own problems to contend with since she had a stammer and was very shy. Being different in America was no different than being different in Amsterdam. Both situations made the girls sad and withdrawn. When Sylvie came to America, Ma neglected Amy and worshiped Sylvie. Sylvie was the one Amy leaned on for support, the one who comforted her. Sylvie grew up to seem far more outgoing and far stronger than Amy, who remained shy and introverted. Sylvie married Jim, a professor. He was white and from an elite, wealthy family. They had snobbish ideas about one’s place in, and behavior in, the world. Sylvie had her own very successful career in the corporate world. She was now financially secure, but still different on many levels!The men in the book, Pa, Lucus, Filip and Wilhem, are largely irrelevant or not well developed. The women are generally portrayed as mean and strong, rigid and controlled, as well as controlling. The men are meeker and softer in their behavior and development, with hidden violent tendencies. Both the men and women harbor secrets which will undue all of their lives.When Sylvie suddenly disappears, after visiting Holland for her grandmother’s impending death, the story continues to become distracted with side issues. The characters did not feel authentic nor did their behavior. Sometimes it felt contradictory. I did not develop an attachment to any of them or a particular liking for any of them. I found them weak, selfish, self-serving, immature and headstrong, if not also lacking in common sense and judgment. The book is about very flawed characters that never seem to move on from their early descriptions as children.Perhaps it was the author’s intent to distance the characters from the reader, emphasizing their “otherness” by not developing any significant traits in them to draw them closer to the reader. Just as they never felt accepted in their worlds, maybe she wanted the reader to also not accept them, and to always view them as penultimate outsiders. The moral judgment of the characters, white, homosexual, heterosexual, Asian, American, rich and poor, was atrocious. While I wanted to keep reading to discover where the book would lead me, I was disappointed when it finally decided on one direction and took me there. At times, the narrative waxed poetic and at times it felt like it was geared to a young adult reader. It never truly grew up into a book I could recommend to others.
    • 4/5
      An aphorism is a short clever saying that is intended to express a general truth. Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok is filled with them. Three random examples are:Well, if dogs could prey, it would rain bones.But those who wish to eat honey must suffer the sting of the bees.If one often walks by the riverside, one's shoes will eventually get wet.They add so much to the flavor of Kwok's third novel. But this is a decidedly different sort of novel from her other two, both of which I have read and enjoyed. This one is a dark, suspenseful mystery. I very much appreciate when a good novelist writes different sorts of books. So many seem to write books that are so similar. This book is about an immigrant family with inter-generational secrets and takes place in New York City and The Netherlands. Kwok paints a picture with every scene she describes. Her characters are very well developed, and experience growth and change over time. Sylvie's childhood was with her grandmother and cousin's family in The Netherlands because her immigrant parents could not care for her when they first came to New York City. At about nine years of age she rejoins them and her young sister. When this hard striving, married young woman learns that her beloved grandmother is terminally ill, she returns to The Netherlands to be with her. She does not return home and disappears. Her sister Amy travels to The Netherlands hoping to find her. The novel goes back and forth from the perspective of each sister as well as some short chapters from the perspective of their mother.Although the novel progresses very slowly at times it certainly kept me reading to find out what happened to Sylvie. In fact, I broke my cardinal rule and looked a little ahead, when I needed more information. Luckily, I did not fully uncover the true answer to the mystery, so I was able to avoid the real answers until I got to the end.
    • 4/5
      I found a lot to enjoy in this story of a woman's search for her sister. I was quickly drawn in both because I wanted an answer to the mystery and because I cared about the characters.The characters felt real. They were fully developed and flawed. There was also considerable character growth (something that's important to me), especially on the part of Amy. At the beginning she was shy and sheltered. The furthest she'd ever gone from New York was New Jersey. In search of her sister, however, Amy traveled alone to Europe, and that was just the start of her character's evolution.The narrative style further helped me to get to know these women. Amy and Sylvie took turns doing most of the narration, though their mother occasionally took part, and each woman had a distinctive voice. Sylvie's storytelling begins a month before her disappearance while Amy and their mother pick up about the time Sylvie goes missing. The alternating points of view also served as an effective way to unravel the mystery.The settings, primarily the Netherlands but also Queens, Brooklyn Heights, and Venice, were brought to life and felt a bit like characters in their own right.However, what I appreciated most was the way the story incorporated real life issues such as obstacles immigrants face and struggles women sometimes deal with in the workplace. There was domestic drama too, showing the power of secrets to either destroy or heal a family.Though this is the first book I've read by this author, it will not be the last. I would recommend it to those who enjoy mysteries or even just a good story.Thank you to NetGalley for the E-ARC.