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.

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

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