Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Title: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Author: Jamie Ford

Pages: 290

Genre: Historical Fiction

Grade: B+

Synopsis: The book takes place in Seattle during World War II.  Seattle had a strong Chinese and Japanese presence with areas of the city known as Japantown and Chinatown where people of these ethnicities generally lived.  Henry Lee was a Chinese child who attended the white American/English school where he befriended a Japanese girl, Keiko Okabe.  His friendship was kept in secret as his father hated the Japanese because of the destruction they were causing in China during the war.  When all of the Japanese families in Seattle were gathered and sent to Japanese Interment Camps, Henry works hard to still maintain his friendship with Keiko.

My Review: There are so many books that use WWII as a backdrop, that I sometimes find it exhausting to read another.  However, I found this one interesting and unique because it deals with the Japanese Internment Camps, which is a part of the war that is a black mark on the United States.  That said, it is unfair to judge the nation's response without having been there during Pearl Harbor and the rest of the war. Hopefully, though, we will always remember these mistakes and learn from them. Ok, enough digression on that vein.  It took me a good chunk of the book to get into it.  The story flips back and forth between the 1940s and the modern day and it was sometimes confusing.  Otherwise, a pretty decent book.