There’s Sylvie, the older daughter who has lived a virtually perfect life – perhaps based on the Harvard-educated author’s life – academically and professionally if not always personally, until it all too suddenly falls apart. I imagine that some editors would have advised deleting the character her role could have been detailed in a few basic paragraphs. Because Ma is said to have limited English speaking skills, her voice is extremely limited. There’s “Ma,” the mother of Sylvie Lee and Amy Lee, who migrated to New York City with her husband from China. There are three basic characters and narrators. (To be fair, we are also informed that people in Holland like to keep their window shades open at almost all times.) And this is close to the total of what we learn about cultural differences in the novel. Instead the multicultural surface is barely scratched.Īt one point we learn that in Holland someone having a birthday is expected to invite individuals to her party and to pay for everyone who attends the very opposite of what would happen in the U.S. It seemed like a great opportunity for Kwok to take the reader into the specifics – and differences among, all three cultures – Chinese, American, and Dutch.

Why? Because the story involves an extended family – some of whose members immigrated to the United States from China, and others who wound up in the Netherlands (Holland). Jean Kwok’s third novel, Searching for Sylvie Lee, felt like a missed opportunity to me.

Searching for Sylvie Lee: A Novel by Jean Kwok (William Morrow, $26,99, 336 pages)

Finding sylvie lee