Every family has a skeleton in its closet which cannot remain hidden for very long and when it comes to the scene the family is bound to shatter. A single mother and her two daughters have been living a placid life for years when out of nowhere the calamity hit their family hard. The eldest daughter vanishes in thin air with no trace of any sort. There were secrets that the mother was hiding all these years because she thought that she would be able to bury the past in this way.
No one can run away from the past if it is full of evils and corruption of the elders. Sylvie went to see her grandmother for the last time as she was on her death bed on her return she disappeared. Amy the younger sister wants her back because she was the one who was looking after the whole family all these years.
The family when Sylvie was seven sent her to a distant relative because of economical crisis but still the girl never mind all that. She was there whenever the family needed her and was a good example for her younger sister to follow in all respects.
Now when she was gone it is up to the little sister to search for her by all means, in her search Amy goes to her grandmother’s house and finds something more than her sister i.e the dark family secrets and the cause of her sister’s disappearance. Jean Kwok has written the novel in layers, and we open these layers one after the other in the voice of Angela Lin, Caroline McLaughlin and Samantha Quan.
Jean has a habit of writing about such girls, like the one we saw in Girl in Translation and Mambo in Chinatown. Secrets in the stories are the secret of Jean’s successful books that start coming to the listener’s collection one after the other.
