Novels Now

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Fiction
2009 Ballantine Books
Finished on 1/5/09
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
ARC - Due out on January 27, 2009

Publisher’s Blurb

In 1986, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. The hotel has been boarded up for decades, but now a 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. As Henry looks on, memories take him back to the 1940s.

At the height of the war, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student, at the exclusive Rainier Academy. They forge a friendship—and an innocent love—that transcend the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. After Keiko and her family are evacuated 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.

Now Henry is trying to make sense of the past—to explain the actions of his nationalistic father; to bridge the gap between himself and his modern Chinese American son; to confront the choices he made many years ago. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable portrait of a couple whose story teaches us the power of forgiveness.

Jamie Ford is the son of American and Chinese parents and an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. An award-winning short-story writer, he lives in Great Falls, Montana. This is his first novel.

I received this book from the publisher back in August, but didn’t feel compelled to pick it up until after Christmas. What luck that it was my first completed book of the New Year; it’s a winner! I love the time period and location (a bit reminiscent of Gutterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars) and especially enjoy coming-of-age stories, so this was right up my alley. The narrative is set in 1986, flashing back to the years between 1942 and 1945 when Henry and Keiko are in the fifth grade.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is bound to be a popular selection among book groups, particularly those in the Pacific Northwest. I enjoyed the story, although at times thought it read more like a young adult novel than general fiction. The writing is occasionally simplistic and I finished reading the novel without a single lyrical passage to share. And yet, I couldn’t put this book down! I found Ford’s book much more satisfying than Sandra Dallas’ Tall Grass (another coming-of-age novel depicting the internment camps during World War II), particularly enjoying the references to Seattle’s jazz history, including that of Oscar Holden.

Here are a couple of photos from the author’s website. Go here to see more.

VJ Day in Seattle

I’ll be anxious to hear what others think of this debut novel.