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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