Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Book: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Pages: 285
Finished: June 2009
Challenges:
** New Author Challenge
** Read & Review
** War Through the Generations

First Sentence: "Old Henry Lee stood transfixed by all the commotion at the Panama Hotel."

To sum this book up in one word, I would have to use bittersweet. This debut novel by Jamie Ford has been making the rounds in the book blogging world for several months and I knew I wanted to read it long before I really knew much about it based on the cover alone.

When I discovered it was set in my home city, Seattle, I wanted to read it even more. So many of the places mentioned in the book are places I know about and have heard about. The old Panama Hotel mentioned above is a place that I asked my husband to take me to this summer so I could see it in person. What I have never heard a lot of is that of what the main story is about--the evacuation of the Japanese community in Seattle and the San Juan Islands. I knew this event happened, but only because I read, many years ago, the book Snow Falling on Cedars. That book quickly became one of my all time favorites. What I did not know until reading this book was that there was a temporary camp at the Puyallup Fair Grounds. I also did not know that so very few of those who were shipped away ever actually returned to Seattle. Never returned to claim their possessions that were stowed away because there was nothing for them to come back to. In the 3 or so years they were imprisoned, the buildings and businesses that comprised Japantown in Seattle were bought up by other people and turned into the very diverse international district which at the time of the end of the war was predominantly Chinese. This was a dreadful event in our history and one that should be talked about more when discussions of WWII occur. When I graduated from high school in 1980, my formal education in a school which sat in the suburbs of Seattle included the very bare minimum on this topic. It was like it was kind of added in at the end of our study of WWII after spending weeks and weeks on the European Front and the Holocaust.


I read mostly good things about this book from numerous blogs, but I did read a few criticisms when I looked on Amazon and I have to say that I agree with one of those criticisms in particular. The two protagonists, Henry and Keiko are just too young for me to believe they could feel the things so deeply that Ford has written at their age--the age was 12. Especially back in 1942, where even though the world was turned upside down I think children were a little more innocent when it came to love and the opposite gender at such a young age.

The novel did read a little like a young adult book which explains to me why this book showed up on a reading list for Sam's 7th grade honors history class this spring as one option they could read as a wind up to their Washington State History unit. Sam did not choose to read this one, but I may encourage him to read it this summer.

Regardless of that one little criticism I did enjoy this book! The prose is sparse, but a very clear picture of the two cultures Henry and Keiko come from are portrayed beautifully.

From Booklist Ford vacillates between a front story dominated by nostalgia and a back story dominated by fear. The front story struggles to support the weight of the back story, and the complexity Ford brings to the latter is the strength of this debut novel, which considers a Chinese American man’s relationship with a Japanese American woman in the 1940s and his son in the 1980s. Although Ford does not have anything especially novel to say about a familiar subject (the interplay between race and family), he writes earnestly and cares for his characters, who consistently defy stereotype. Ford posits great meaning in objects—a button reading “I am Chinese” and a jazz record, in particular—but the most striking moments come from the characters’ readings of each other.