Jean Kwok has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.1★ across 23 ratings. The most-rated is Searching for Sylvie Lee.
Searching for Sylvie Lee
Summary
Instant New York Times Best Seller Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick A Read with Jenna • Today Show 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 • Publishers Weekly, and many more “Powerful.... A twisting tale of love, loss, and dark family secrets.” (Paula Hawkins, number one New York Times best-selling 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 best-selling 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 pause-resister, 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.
©2019 Jean Kwok (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers
Girl in Translation
Summary
Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, an inspiring debut about an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures. When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life--like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition--Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles. Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant--a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.
©2010 Jean Kwok (P)2010 Penguin
Mambo in Chinatown
Summary
From the best-selling author of Girl in Translation, a novel about a young woman torn between her family duties in Chinatown and her escape into the world of ballroom dancing. Twenty-two-year-old Charlie Wong grew up in New York's Chinatown, the older daughter of a Beijing ballerina and a noodle maker. Though an ABC (America-born Chinese), Charlie's entire world has been limited to this small area. Now grown, she lives in the same tiny apartment with her widower father and her 11-year-old sister, and works - miserably - as a dishwasher. But when she lands a job as a receptionist at a ballroom dance studio, Charlie gains access to a world she hardly knew existed, and everything she once took to be certain turns upside down. Gradually, at the dance studio, awkward Charlie's natural talents begin to emerge. With them, her perspective, expectations, and sense of self are transformed - something she must take great pains to hide from her father and his suspicion of all things Western. As Charlie blossoms, though, her sister becomes chronically ill. As Pa insists on treating his ailing child exclusively with Eastern practices to no avail, Charlie is forced to try to reconcile her two selves and her two worlds - Eastern and Western, old world and new - to rescue her little sister without sacrificing her newfound confidence and identity.
©2014 Jean Kwok (P)2014 Penguin Audio