While the thriller aspects of Searching for Sylvie Lee are somewhat uneven, readers interested in the family drama are sure to be drawn in by Kwok’s undeniable gift for creating memorable, intimate portraits of characters. Ma, Pa, Willem, and Helena had all kept this information secret from Sylvie, Lukas, and Amy. Ma confesses to Amy that Sylvie was actually the daughter of Ma and Willem, who had had an affair. Kwok’s novel is at its best and most engaging when exploring the Lee sisters’ relationships with themselves and each other, the effects of immigration on entire generations of families, and the weight that the adult children of immigrants often feel. They find Sylvie’s body in a nearby bay, and Amy is devastated. Another notable strength of the novel is how deeply it delves into the mindset of immigrants who never quite belong anywhere they live. Sylvie, the titular character of Jean Kwok’s third novel, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, a girl who learns her manners from etiquette books and studies designer brands as intently as her statistics textbooks. The beauty and tragedy of Searching for Sylvie Lee is in how much these sisters love each other because of - or in spite of - their upbringing. One might assume that resentments would exist between these sisters, but Kwok renders their relationship with genuine tenderness, gently revealing their human fallibility. The alternating structure allows readers to witness how the Lee sisters frequently saw the best in each other but thought the worst of themselves.

Finding sylvie lee