Review of The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok

*The Leftover Woman* by Jean Kwok (2023). Published by William Morrow.

Throughout my Fall 2023 semester, I had a lot going on. I was working multiple jobs, being a full time graduate student, and I decided to pick up a remote internship over at the Smithsonian, specifically with their books and publishing internship.

That meant I needed to find something to fill in the background noise, or I would go absolutely insane.

So I started listening to audiobooks as I was doing my work, and it kept me on track for getting my books read. I’d also go insane if I didn’t have any books to read, but I simply didn’t have the time this semester.

Anyways, one of the books I ended up checking out to listen to at the end of the semester, while I was cranking out my final papers, was The Leftover Woman.

I’d been hearing some buzz about this book, but never looked at the synopsis before deciding to check it out. And I was pretty interested in what it had to offer already, and I will say, this one went by like a breeze.

Let’s get into the review!

The story of two women in New York City struggling for completely different reasons—until they’re connected.

There are two women this story focuses on, and we bounce back and forth between the two. One is Jasmine Yang, who has come from a rural village in China.

She has no money, no family, and she ran away from her husband in China. It doesn’t help that not long after she came to the United States and New York, she discovers her old best friend and first love, Anthony, when trying to find a job at a cade.

Jasmine has a task to focus on though: she wants to find her daughter, who was taken away from her at birth because of the One Child Policy.

Her daughter is with Rebecca Whitney, who works in publishing. Rebecca runs in the wealthy circles of New York, and has such a great career. People know who she is, and her husband works as a professor at a good university in the city that specializes in China.

She decides to hire a Chinese nanny to try and get her daughter to connect with her roots, and, as it turns out, Jasmine is the one hired to take care of the daughter. It seems like a win-win situation, although Rebecca and her husband have no idea about the truth.

But when a scandal hits Rebecca’s industry, it changes everything for her. She also finds a condom, and she starts thinking that her husband is cheating on her, and more doubt begins to cloud her mind when she realizes that he’s been taking his clients to strip clubs.

As her life begins to fall apart, Jasmine is trying to figure out how to get hers back before her husband figures out where exactly she is.

These two women are about to collide, and they’re bound together by the child they both think of as their own. They come from completely different backgrounds and are in different socioeconomic classes, making interacting with each other even come with its own power dynamics throughout the course of the book.

There’s a hint of mystery and thriller to all of the plot as well, and I found that the writing style made me want to keep listening. If it were a physical book, I know I would’ve kept flipping through because of how compelled I was by the story.

That said, there were definitely a few holes in the story. I won’t go into detail because this is a summary of my thoughts, not an in-depth one (otherwise we’d be here all day!), but I think that a little bit more expansion could’ve helped this novel out.

The ending also felt really rushed, and I was metaphorically scratching my head at it because I thought that it just came so suddenly and all the biggest secrets were dripping out like a leak.

Overall Thoughts

I thought that this is a book that had a lot to think about after because of the mentioned differences between these women.

We have one woman who was sold into a marriage and had her daughter taken away by government policy, while we have another woman who supposedly has it all but is unable to truly enjoy her life without a fear of it crumbling.

It’s like a cultural mirror, and although Rebecca definitely has way more privilege than Jasmine, she still is struggling, too. All in all, this was a great novel and if you haven’t read it already, go pick it up.

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