The Leftover Woman - Jean Kwok - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Jean Kwok

GENRE: Mystery, Women's Fiction

RATING: 2.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A book that is mostly women’s fiction focussing on a Chinese mom’s quest to be reunited with her daughter. The tag of ‘mystery/thriller’ applies to it in the loosest possible sense. I liked a few things but was equally unhappy with some other points. This is an outlier review.

Story Synopsis:

2007. New York.

Fleeing from an abusive marriage in China, Jasmine arrives in New York City with hardly any support system of money or family. Her main purpose is to be reunited with her daughter, who, unknown to her, was taken away at birth and offered to an American couple for adoption. With her ex searching for her, Jasmine is running out of time to find her child and escape permanently. But how is she to do that?

Rebecca, an editor-in-chief at a publishing company, has it all – a job she loves, a talented and good-looking husband, a loveable adopted daughter Fifi, prestige, and wealth. However, her life suddenly seems to be on a downswing, with first her job and then her marriage in trouble. As the world around her begins to collapse, Rebecca knows she needs to save her family and her job at any cost. But how is she to do that?

The lives of these two women, as you might have guessed, are on a collision course, which forms the crux of the novel.

The story comes to us in the first person perspective of Jasmine and the third person perspective of Rebecca.

Bookish Yays:

💐 I loved Fifi’s character – the only one to be written in an age-appropriate manner. Her love for her parents, her accepting her mother’s instructions willingly, her desperation to impress her parents – all felt realistic. She was the only loveable character in the book for me.

💐 I liked the contrast between the two main characters – an undocumented immigrant and a privileged white woman. Their disparate backgrounds allowed many social points to be raised.

💐 One revelation in the book totally caught me by surprise. Just one. But it was a good one.

💐 The repercussions of China's controversial one child policy are covered well. As a resident of China’s neighbouring country, I was already aware of this policy and its consequences, hence I wasn’t shocked at the details. But it was still a creditable inclusion in this plot.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🌹 Rebecca's character is tough to like, but I liked her representation as the ignorant “do-gooder” who can’t see her own shortcomings and her white-saviour complex. Through her arc, we get to see the systemic racism prevalent in the USA and also her ignorance of her white privilege. Admittedly, this is handled in too obtrusive a manner, but still, it was good to see the issues tackled head on. At the same time, her personal mistakes and her clumsiness sees highly exaggerated, which doesn't go with the rest of her personality. Many of her goof-ups seem forced into her arc, possibly so that we can feel sorry for her, which I didn’t.

🌹 I might have praised some aspects of Rebecca’s and her husband’s parenting techniques with Fifi, but I recently read an eye-opening anthology written by trans-racial adoptees about trans-racial experiences, and this brings into question many of the decisions taken by the couple to keep Fifi “connected to her culture.” Their heart was in the right place, but their approach was totally wrong. I don’t completely agree with the message this book sends to trans-racial adoptive parents.

🌹 The details of Rebecca's work are good at highlighting what editors actually do. But can an editor be so castigated and shunned from the industry just because an author lied in her book? The depiction seems somewhat farfetched, especially when even newspapers also call out the editor publicly in the scandal.

🌹 Jasmine’s work at the Opium club works better in comparison, representing the dark underbelly of the Asian community in NYC. I would have been very impressed by these details, had I not read a similar (and better handled) portrayal of an Asian “club” in Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s ‘Dust Child’ earlier this year. This one paled in comparison.

🌹 Unlike most readers, I liked what happened at the end, because it was the only realistic solution to the problem at hand. But the pre-climax scenes were straight from a soap opera – overly melodramatic.

🌹 The title is good (and it is explained in the book), but does it represent the story perfectly? I don’t think so. This isn’t just Jasmine’s story.

Bookish Nays:

🌵 The romance in Jasmine’s arc is so cheesy YA in style! The weird metaphors and the description of the intimacy scenes are cringeworthy.

🌵 There are multiple references to the “Beautiful Country” (USA, just in case you thought it was China), multiple references to fashion brands, multiple references to being thin, multiple references to physical beauty… Aargh! The book needs some strict editing. Moreover, nothing in the story feels 2007. Especially the technological depiction. There are even some anachronisms in the conversations.

(Editing to Add: It seems that "Beautiful Country" is a direct translation of the Mandarin 美国 (Mei Guo), which stands for the USA. That's why it is used so often in the book. I am still not happy with the repetition but at least I know the reason for this quaint usage. Thanks to GR user Allie for this clarification!)

🌵 In what world is this a mystery-thriller and how did it even get nominated as such in the Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Mystery & Thriller (2023)? The “mystery”, if I can call it that, is totally guessable, and the thrills comes only in one action-filled chapter towards the end. Most of the book is a woman’s fiction wannabe.

🌵 The representation of China per se is very stereotypical and one-noted. (Any book that depicts a country and its citizens in just one shade is doing something wrong.)

🌵 Both Jasmine’s and Rebecca’s arcs meander away form the core plot – that of Jasmine wanting to reunite with her child, who is clearly Rebecca’s adopted daughter. (Not a spoiler – only the densest of readers would fail to establish this link from the blurb.) However, there are many frivolous subplots that take up needless page space.

🌵 There are plenty of plot holes. Even till the end, we don’t know exactly how Jasmine escaped her abusive husband and reached the US, though we know whose help she took. How does Rebecca have time to go to a gun range when she doesn’t have time for her daughter and has to work till late in the night to fulfil her professional commitments? How did Jasmine locate her child? How did Jasmine bump into Anthony so conveniently in such a big city? Ignoring a couple of plot holes is easy, but this one was as holey as a colander. The entire approach is too simplistic.

At one point, I honestly thought that I was reading a debut work. To discover that this is the tenth novel by an established writer left me astounded.

A majority of reviewers have found this a great book. So don’t listen to me being the Grinch. Please read their reviews and take a call for yourself. In the meantime, I am, as usual, perched on Outlier Island, pondering over my book selection habits.

My thanks to William Morrow and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Leftover Woman”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.