Safe to say, Sylvie Lee offers plenty to talk about - get a few glasses of Pinot Grigio in your fellow book-clubbers, and you may even find some heated debates brewing. Kwok’s novel seeks to understand what happens “when the language of our hearts is different from the language of the people that we love the most,” a problem that can arise in immigrant families where there is a language barrier. Their mother isn’t quite what Amy thought either - for starters, she’s far less timid - and these false assumptions were partially due to the fact that Amy isn’t fluent in her mother’s native Chinese while her mother has never fully mastered English. One of the things I really wanted to convey with the book is how impenetrable that curtain of language and culture can be.” Amy spends much of the novel discovering things about Sylvie that don’t match up with the picture-perfect image she once had of her lovable, Ivy League grad older sister.
The story develops as three distinct narrators each relay their perspective of events: “For the mother, she’s thinking in Chinese Sylvie, the golden child who disappears, is thinking in Dutch and Amy, the younger timid sister, is thinking in English.
“The book is in English, but the inner dialogue is in each person’s native language,” Kwok tells EW.
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