When I started reading Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation with a series of coincidences, I was actually very excited. As the book progressed, the excitement turned into sadness and ambition. I’ve always wondered about hard lives, trying to imagine how terrifying it would be for people, especially girls. This book can be a beautiful escape if you have as much curiosity as mine. Jean Kwok is a writer you should experience as soon as possible.
As usual, I will not write what the book is about, but I can say that it has similarities to The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. There is a Chinese mother-daughter story again, but after reading this book, I did not forget easily. It will stay with you for a long time. While reading it, you’ll get nervous, feel sorry, and curse a lot. Because things you are reading about do happen, regularly. You might have seen or heard from your relatives and friends about them. In this respect, there is a side of the book that touches the reader.
Girl in Translation is a powerful book. You read about the story of a Chinese girl and surprisingly find yourself in it. Isn’t this purely amazing? Books like this make me love literature more! Oh hey, there’s a beautiful love story in the book as well. You’ll lose yourself in it. Enjoy!
About the book: Girl in Translation
New York Times bestseller Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok is a powerful story about a Chinese immigrant family in Brooklyn.
Kimberley Chang and her mother move from Hong Kong to New York. A new life awaits them – making a new home in a new country. But all they can afford is a verminous, broken-windowed Brooklyn apartment. The only heating however is an unreliable oven. They are deep in debt.
And neither one speaks one word of English.
Yet there is hope. Eleven-year-old Kim goes to school. And though cut off by an alien language and culture and forced by poverty to work nights in a sweatshop – she finds the classroom challenges liberating. In books and learning she’ll be saved. But can Kim successfully turn to lost girl from Hong Kong into a happy American woman? And should she?
Jean Kwok’s however powerful and moving tale of hardship and triumph, of heartbreak and love, speaks of all that gets lost in translation.
Jean Kwok emigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn as a child; however her first novel Girl in Translation is based loosely on her own experience as a Chinese immigrant in America. With Girl in Translation Jean Kwok has won the American Library Association Alex Award, an Orange New Writers title and international critical acclaim.
About the author: Jean Kwok
Jean Kwok is the award-winning, New York Times and international bestselling Chinese American author of the novels Girl in Translation, Mambo in Chinatown, and Searching for Sylvie Lee, which was chosen as The Today Show Book Club Pick.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
