Hello Beautiful People! Welcome back to another review! For this review, I get into The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok, a mystery thriller that follows the lives of two very different women a native and an immigrant to New York.
Main Characters:
- Jasmine: A Chinese immigrant new to New York City who struggles to find her way, escape her past, but also mend some bridges
- Wen: Jasmine’s abusive husband whom she came to the States to escape
- Rebecca: A New York City native who struggles to upkeep her high-profile life, and her family life
- Fiona and Brandon: Brandon is Rebecca’s wife, and Fiona is their adopted daughter
Some warnings for future readers:
- Includes arranged marriages, and child grooming
My Review
The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok is a unique and interesting book that follows two very seemingly different women who just so happen to be in the same place. Since this is a new book I won’t be going into a summary and commentary section, but overall I found the book to be really enjoyable. I gave it a 7.5/10 rating.
My rating was a little lower because I found it to be a bit slow at times. It really picked up around the end which really switched it around for me. Early on in the book we are introduced to one of the two main characters Jasmine. Jasmine has come to the United States from China to escape an abusive arranged marriage that she had been in since a teen. With the hopes of rediscovering herself, she comes to New York City. An old friend seemingly drives her there but it’s clear the two have a very complicated past. Jasmine herself is presented to be a complicated character early on. I struggle a bit to figure her out. At times she seems very shy and unconfident, but it’s clear in other parts that she actually does have a lot of confidence but hides it for some reason. She seems reserved at parts, but also in others is up for a challenge. I just struggled to figure out what her angle was and what really brought her to the United States.
Rebecca was also a very challenging character. Rebecca is a high-profile publisher and scout for a publishing house in New York. Her work seems to keep her very busy and also makes her try to present herself as perfect and polished. Despite the way she presents herself she isn’t perfect and is actually crumbling under all the pressure she puts herself under. Along with being a polished career woman, she tries to present her family as perfect, but they are far from it. Rebecca and her husband Brandon adopted their child Fiona from China. Even though Rebecca knew she was adopting a child that was a different race and culture than herself she often is disgruntled and frustrated by her and her daughter’s differences. She often tries to push her daughter to be someone she isn’t to keep up appearances that realistically she can’t even keep up for herself. I struggled to connect with Rebecca because early on she seemed very trivial and stuck up to me. She didn’t seem overly unique or interesting but seemed to see herself in that way. There were parts of Rebecca where the mask would fall and we would see the softer parts of her. There were parts where she was nurturing and kind, and we would often see these when she wasn’t overworking or overstressing herself out on things like work or appearances. It’s clear that Rebecca does very badly want to connect to her daughter and family, she just has really weird ways of showing it.
I struggled for a good portion of the book to see how the pieces connected or why we were looking at the lives of two very different women who just so happened to live in the same huge city. The pieces do start to fit together eventually, and it’s full of exciting twists and turns. I started to enjoy the book a lot more once I had gotten to the part where things started to fit together, the earlier parts were enjoyable too, but I enjoyed it more once we got to see what Jasmine and Rebecca would bring into each other’s lives. It’s very clear early on though that despite the two women’s glaring differences they have a lot of similarities. Both are trying to figure out how to be a woman in a world that’s beating them down, and both are battling to fight different stereotypes that are overtaking their ability to be the people they want to be. I enjoyed that Jean used this opportunity to show that while we may be raised differently from one another, be a different race, and speak a different language, we all share similar struggles in this world. Whether rich or poor we all are just desperately trying to figure out what our purpose is.
The thing that I appreciated about this book as well is that even though I maybe didn’t enjoy or agree with the characters at some point, I was still rooting for a happy ending for Rebecca and Jasmine. Despite both women’s flaws, it’s clear that both are just in the pursuit of happiness, and to figure out who they really are, and as the reader I am not sure how you can’t hope for only good things for them. Rebecca despite for most of the book being very much in her own world, eventually sees that there’s a lot more to the world than just being seen as ‘perfect’. Furthermore, Jasmine sees that she has more good attributes about herself than she is willing to show and that it’s okay to have positive attributes that draw people to her. As I said before parts of this book definitely piqued my interest but I found the start slow. It’s definitely worth it if you can make it through those slow parts, but to a degree, I am not sure if the slow parts are worth the eventual climax of the story. There were just parts that I felt were filler, and weren’t really needed to tell the story. It may have made it a bit more enjoyable for me if things had just moved along quickly.
I always enjoy mysteries and thrillers that have an underlying deeper message, and this book is definitely one of them. I find it to be a unique way to present the different issues affecting our society like immigration, sexism, racism, the working class order and poverty, and more. I found it interesting to have the two main characters be so different because it meant that throughout the book, we were getting two very different perspectives of things. It was interesting to get Jasmine’s perspective and to see why she would have this desire to escape her old life in China to come to America. It was also interesting to see her experience as an undocumented immigrant and her struggles to find her feet in this new area with no assistance.
I hope you enjoyed this review! Feel free to check out my socials @baddiebookreview to be kept up to date for when I release a new review.
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