Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet / Jamie Ford

This book received a lot of attention in the library several years ago, was featured as a popular book club choice, but was one I never personally got around to reading. Now that the buzz has faded, I found that the eBook version was recently available from the library, so I checked it out to satisfy my curiosity.

The subject is a compelling one. Henry, who is Chinese American, meets Keiko, an American-born Japanese, and their friendship represents an unlikely bridge between two cultures. Being Asian in 1940s Seattle was difficult enough, but being of Japanese descent was even more difficult when Executive Order 9066 dictated the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to internment camps in the interior of the country. Henry’s story is told in flashback mode—we first meet him in 1986 as an adult who has just lost his wife to cancer. One day he walks by the Panama Hotel in former Japantown and learns that the basement holds suitcases and boxes of keepsakes and belongings Japanese American evacuees had stored there “temporarily” when they were hastily separated from their homes and livelihoods. And so this serves as the trigger to recount his relationship to Keiko forty some years earlier.

The novel was interesting, but I found some of the plot elements to be a little clichéd (the school bully, the disapproving parents, the inevitable reunion). Henry and Keiko’s voices sounded more like adults rather than preteens, and some of the novel’s dialog served to provide explicatory background to the reader, which was clunky more often than not. I should have been a little wary about a book whose title sounds a bit like a jingle from a Walgreen’s commercial. The book was very popular, and I enjoyed the story, but in the end I just felt it could have been so much better.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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