The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford - This book was the second selection of our Faculty Book Club for this year. I didn't know a lot about the book outside of the fact that it had been on the NYT bestseller list for several weeks. After reading it, I'm very thankful to my colleagues for choosing it as one of our selections! Ironically, it kind of goes hand-in-hand with our previous selection, Sarah's Key in that the plot focuses on the American internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, sort of similiar to the French roundup of French Jews during that same period. Very interesting that we chose two books that were so similar!
From the NYT review: On the eve of America’s World War II internment of its Japanese residents, 12-year-old Henry Lee meets his first true love. Her name is Keiko, and she’s the only other Asian at Henry’s otherwise all-white Seattle elementary school. She’s also Japanese, which lies at the heart of Henry’s subsequent struggles — with his Chinese nationalist father; his racist, bullying classmates; and, finally, his brutally suspicious country. The hotel of the book’s title is the real Panama Hotel, and that’s where Ford’s story begins, with the basement discovery of what Seattle’s Japanese families left behind when they were sent to the camps. The tale jumps between 1986, just after the death of Henry’s wife (whose name is not Keiko), and the 1940s, setting up its driving mystery: What happened to Henry’s dark-eyed childhood sweetheart? Though the story of life in war-era Seattle and the detention of the city’s Japanese families, including Keiko’s, is rich in detail, its characters feel thin. Henry is terribly earnest and seems always too old for his age — at 12, he has the caution and calm of a 56-year-old; at 56, Ford refers to him as “Old Henry Lee.”
