Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: The international bestseller and word-of-mouth sensation

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In one paragraph--on page four of the book, I believe--the narrator tells the readers that the main character's son is seeing a grief counselor and participating in an Internet support group. This hotel has been boarded up for years but a new owner has discovered something inside - the belongings of Japanese families. A story of lost love, childhood, prejudice and war, but also of endurance and acceptance and resignation that life doesn’t always turn out the way you would want it to. Further, in that same paragraph, he tells us the main character's deceased wife is buried in the same cemetary with Bruce and Brandon Lee--and this is seven years before Brandon's death. He forced Henry to wear a large button declaring Henry to be Chinese in English to protect him from abuses from White people (in spite of the button, Henry still suffers from beatings by a white student at school).

A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don’t repeat those injustices. After Keiko and her family were evacuated to the internment camps, she and Henry could only hope that their promise to each other would be kept. Henry is a Chinese-American boy who lives in Chinatown, Seattle and is close friends with the only other non-white student at his school. There was one more topic covered in great detail here and that was the placing of Japanese families from the west coast in camps. Had this been a "paper" book, or if I had had another audiobook available, I probably would have abandoned it after 50 pages -- if I had even gotten that far!Everyone encounters this big old war in history books or during classroom lectures, but we don't often think about how warfare actually affects the lives of everyday people, particularly those living outside the line of fire. Reading groups will find plenty to discuss in this book, but if you want something more, you could also read Jane Smiley’s recent book Private Life which also deals with the internment of Japanese families in the US. With a wonderful characterisation, mesmerising relationships, a breathtaking narrative and a story that will most certainly leave you wanting more, Hotel on the corner of Bitter and Sweet is one of my highlights of the year. I also found the writing to be clumsy, full of cliches, AND I felt nothing for any of the characters.

It is incredibly rare to find a historical fiction novel about World War Two that isn't set in Europe! The novel concludes with Henry's son Marty locating Keiko in New York City, and Henry goes to see her. The story, set in Seattle, opens in 1986 in front of the Panama Hotel, a place that holds both bitter and sweet memories for Henry Lee, a Chinese American citizen, who is in his mid-fifties and has recently lost his wife, Ethel, to cancer. The story is a diary of the main protagonist Henry Lee, the story consists of two parallel story lines with one following Henry's childhood during the Second World War, and the other showing Henry as a grown man who is married and has a son.It’s about a guy who meets a girl, falls in love with a girl, loses a girl to the Japanese internment and his father’s racism, and moves on to be a good husband to a different woman. Regardless of my less than perfect reading experience, I think this would be a great book for someone looking for a 20th century historical romance.

And because I believe readers—lovers of books, wherever they live, are the best kind of people—curious and compassionate, creative and filled with boundless hope. 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. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his father; that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made years ago. Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. Non-combatant German-American and Italian-American citizens were not placed into American concentration camps.The novel explores the themes of father–son relationships, and loyalty both in the familial and national contexts. He believes the item is somewhere among the hordes of forgotten objects in the basement of the hotel. This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American.