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.

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If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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