The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee


Written By: Stacey Lee

Published By: G.P. Putnam in 2019

ISBN: 978-1524740955

Plot Summary: Jo Kuan is an undocumented Chinese American girl who lives with her adopted dad in a basement underneath a printing shop where the owners don't know that they are down there. Jo is a maid for a another family called the Paynes who help her pay the family's bills. Jo starts writing a self help column for the paper that the Bell family prints under a pseudonym where she espouses ideas like women's rights and marriage. Jo makes friends with the Bell's son Nathan who helps her and her father work through a money issue with a fixer named Billy Riggs. Jo comes to find out that she is the illicit daughter of the Payne's and that she was given away to her father to help hide the fact that she was born out of wedlock. She continues to write her advice column and it becomes more radical as she lets her readers know her real thoughts. She ends up telling the Bells that they have been living in the secret basement and they invite her to live there legally with her adopted father. 

Critical Analysis: This book shows the inequities that exist amongst people of different races and classes in the south during the 1890's. Jo is a female protagonist who shows that even when people count you out as someone who doesn't matter, there are still ways that you can get your message and point across to the world. You can be invisible in your everyday life but you can be heard through the power of writing under pseudonyms. This book also uses the theme of secrets that can be a positive change in the world like with Jo's writing, and negative as when her mother gives her up for adoption rather than be shamed by the people in her social class. 

Review: Kirkus Book Review

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. (Historical fiction. 13-18)

Connections: Students can do research on the history of race and racism when it comes to people of different countries and can focus on how Asian Americans were treated during the Westward Expansion Time Period through how they were treated during World War Two with the internment camps. 

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