"Searching for Sylvie Lee" by Jean Kwok

The disappearance of a beloved older sister, Sylvie Lee, and the search for her by her younger sister Amy is the ostensible plot of Jean Kwok’s newest book.   But we are told in the first chapter that Amy admires the quote by Willa Cather: “The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.”

Amy gathers the courage to travel alone to The Netherlands to look for her accomplished older sister who traveled there a month prior to visit their dying grandmother, a woman Amy has never met, but who raised Sylvie in her first nine years of life.  Sylvie was sent to Holland due to her parents’ dire economic circumstances, but she returned to her parents at the age of nine to help take care of two-year-old Amy.  Amy adores her, and Sylvie’s disappearance with no word is unlike anything that she has ever done. 

Amy arrives in Holland with no understanding of Dutch or of the Dutch culture, which is so unlike her own upbringing in New York City.  She meets her mother’s cousin Helena, her husband Willem, and their son Lukas, who is Sylvie’s age and who grew up with her, along with Lukas’ and Sylvie’s Dutch friends, Filip and Estelle.  Amy is perplexed by this family she has never met but who had such a big influence on her sister’s life.  She is frustrated by the Dutch police, who don’t take her missing person’s report seriously, and she is mystified by Lukas’ assurance that Sylvie is fine and that she is just thinking things through. 

The story unfolds like a peeling onion, with chapters from the perspectives of Amy, Ma, and Sylvie, and we discover that family secrets are a dangerous thing, and they abide in multiples in this family of immigrants.  They are slowly revealed to Amy — and to the reader.

One of the great strengths of this book is the portrayal of the immigrant experience, with the longing for home and the need to fit into a culture that is inscrutable and often unfriendly.  It is made more complex by the situation of two families in two foreign cultures, and there are wonderful descriptions of individuals meeting and bumping up against these cultures.  The author does a fine job of highlighting these cultures through the use of language, and each character speaks English in a way that shows his or her own background—Ma with flowery phrases but awkward sentence structure, Amy as an American, Sylvie in Holland with phrasing that is obviously an English translation of Dutch (her native language). 

At one point, Ma says of Sylvie and Amy: “There descended such a barrier between me and my daughters, like a curtain through which you could only vaguely make out the figures on the other side.  The Brave Language [English] belonged to the devil with all of its strange consonants, a puzzle I could not solve, and they were constantly chattering in it: stories, joys, and pains.  I desperately tried to understand.  I never could.  I could not reach them and they barely noticed me.  I asked them to speak Central Kingdom talk but they ignored me as if I had been playing the lute for a cow.”

While the plot seems a little overwrought at times, the ideas that Kwok puts forth about families and their relationships, love and its complexities, and the hard life of and prejudices shown to immigrants are compelling and would make for excellent book discussion.  The description of life in Holland is fascinating, and the imagery of open and closed curtains in houses nicely captures the themes of the novel. 

To be released on June 4. 
Thanks to Netgalley and Harper Collins for an advance copy.  (Quotes are not from the finished copy.)


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