Review: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

I have rarely come by a novel that took on the topic of Japanese concentration camps in the US. It's a topic that our country is rightly ashamed of, and I think it gets swept under the rug too often. Ford pulls the reader into the topic like an olympic diver into a pool - swiftly, seamlessly, and beautifully - in his first novel, Hotel on the corner of Bitter and Sweet.

The story moves back and forth between present day, with main character Henry Lee as a middle-aged widower, and the 1940s, when Henry was a chinese-american 'scholarshipping' student at an all-white private school in Seattle. As an outcast in his chinese community for being at a the exculsive white school, and at the school for being chinese, Henry is even alone at his home, with parents who insist he speak only 'american', even while they themselves can only speak cantonese. Henry's solitary existence is broken only by interactions with Sheldon, a black streetcorner saxaphone player until Keiko, a Japanese-american student, enrolls at his school. Her arrival is a definite turning point in his life, and we see through his eyes and heart the changing American politial scene as the Japanese are first discriminated against and then, finally, rounded up and sent away to camps as WWII reaches its highest pitch.

I loved both the stories of Henry as a child and the shorter, interwoven tale of how his adult life has unfolded, with his own son and his fiancee. I loved the journey from silence to redemption, which is precipitated by the discovery of some hidden japanese articles that were hidden in an old hotel when the community was cast away. I loved this book.

Make time for this one, definitely. I genuinely loved the characters, and the story of childhood love and loss.

Rating: five out of five stars - touching, smooth and engrossing