Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

by Jamie Ford

In the opening pages of Jamie Ford's novel, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel in what used to be Seattle's Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. This takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship - and innocent love. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.

The reader gets to experience Henry's memories and emotions as an old man, as well as an innocent and frustrated adolescent (through flashbacks). The author does a great job in allowing the reader to feel the loss, hurt, and conflicted loyalties of this time in American history. It gives the reader a glimpse of the damage that is caused by war, even in the lives of the civilians at home. But even in this bitter time in our own history, we can discover something sweet.

Received 4 stars on Goodreads