The first half was incredibly slow to the point where I almost quit. It got better towards the very end.

3 Stars

Content: one off-page kiss, a naked man, racism ( )

I loved this book so much. The main character, Jo, is very inspiring. I admire her confidence and bravery. She was definitely my favorite character. I also loved the character Noemi. I loved the social topics this book used as a backdrop/discussed. They were relevant to what goes on in the world today. The book was a little bit predictable, but I still loved Stacey Lee’s writing and storytelling. I hope to check out more of Stacey Lee’s books soon. ( )

Took the afternoon yesterday to read this and it was brilliant. I was hooked from page 5 and absolutely fell in love with Jo! Her wit and advice are spot on and I laughed a lot during this book. Jo is a Chinese teenager growing up during the 1890s in Atlanta. She lives underneath a house in which ones of the local newspaper is printed out of - leading her to hear some interesting things, leading her to create Miss Sweetie. Miss Sweetie is an advice column in which she writes articles as well as answers letters written to her. As life often goes, she finds herself in a predicament and the truth leads her down a path where a whole hosts of truths are revealed. The last eight chapters were my favorite. But the real secret is there isn’t a character in this book that I don’t end up loving. There’s some twist and turns and surprises that keep readers interested and wanting more! This is a brilliant book and I’d recommend it to anyone wanting a good laugh or just a good story to fall in love with at the end of the day! ( )

Whether you like The Downstairs Girl or not depends on what you crave. If you crave historical fiction that will teach you, or that helps you realize the myriad of things that were going on in a certian place and time (Atlanta during the 1890s, or an imaginative author who never use trite metaphors or similes, you will love this book. Or if you want to quickly turn pages, you will be disappointed. If you want a simple plot, do not read this book. If you want an intricately spun story with plenty of mystrey, humor and many surprises, you will love it.

Jo Kuan is a Chinese American without voting rights, deStined to be a servang and doesn;t knw who her mother or father are, lives in a basement of a family with Old Gin who she thinks of as old man who adopted not offically but out of love. Chinese Americans were brought into the South after the Civil War to take over what slaves used to do but instead of no pay, they got tiny pay. You could walk or take a streetcar to work. Blacks sat the back of the streetcars, but if you were Chinese American, you didn't know where you sat or were told to gat off. They could not own or rent, where were you supposed to live; It was the start of Jim Crow laws and of cocoa cola. Women suffragettes started working towards the vote of white women. This was not a quiet oeriod of history.

I thoroughly enjoyed this peak at Atlanta in the 1890's through an Asian American young woman's eyes, ears and even her nose. ( )

Jo Kuan leads a double life: a public role as a quiet lady’s maid and a secret one as the voice behind the hottest advice column in 1890 Atlanta.

Chinese American Jo is mostly invisible except for occasional looks of disdain and derisive comments, and she doesn’t mind: Her priority is making sure she and her adoptive father, Chinese immigrant Old Gin, remain safe in their abandoned abolitionists’ hideaway beneath a print shop. But even if she lives on the margins, Jo has opinions of her own which she shares in her newspaper advice column under the byline “Miss Sweetie.” Suddenly all of Atlanta is talking about her ideas, though they don’t know that the witty advice on relationships, millinery, and horse races comes from a Chinese girl. As curiosity about Miss Sweetie mounts, Jo may not be able to stay hidden much longer. And as she learns more about the blurred lines and the hard truths about race in her city and her own past, maybe she doesn’t want to. In her latest work, Lee (The Secret of a Heart Note, 2016, etc.) continues to demonstrate that Chinese people were present—and had a voice—in American history. She deftly weaves historical details with Jo’s personal story of finding a voice and a place for herself in order to create a single, luminous work.

An optimistic, sophisticated portrayal of one facet of Chinese American—and simply American—history.