Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford, is set in the melting pot port city of Seattle. The story bounces between the early 1940's and the mid 1980's as Henry, a Chinese man, with his life in transition remembers his time as a boy in the tumultuous 1940's.

As a young man, Henry struggles within a world that is enslaved by prejudice. His controlling, emotionally detached father forces him to attend an all-white school and speak only English, which neither parent understands. At school he is ridiculed, threatened and beat up on a daily basis as Pearl Harbor is bombed, China invaded and Germany plows over Europe. As his Chinese peers call him "the white devil" his white peers persecute him for being the enemy.

The only light in his world comes from an unexpected source, a Japanese girl named Keiko. She too is a student on scholarship like Henry. As they work as janitors and cafeteria help a friendship is seeded which soon grows in strength and depth. Their love, forbidden by Henry's family is one that history has known before. Like Juliet and her Romeo, society has erected barriers out of hatred, judgement and intolerance.

Seattle's diverse ethnic population it is a perfect setting for the strife and conflict the world is experiencing to be felt intimately. As America's fears and hate escalate towards the Japanese, internment camps are created to imprison all citizens of Japanese dissent. As you can suspect Keiko and her family are one of the thousands of families that are forced to leave everything behind and live in these camps.

"Love knows nothing of rank or riverbank. It will spark between a queen and the poor vagabond who plays the king. And their love should be minded by each. For love denied blights the soul we owe to God." - Shakespeare in Love

This seemed to be the longest little story I have read in a while. I had a difficult time feeling the desire to finish this book. The writing was good, as was the story, but in some way it was lacking. It would have been a more complete novel if the story had been told from both Keiko's perspective as well as Henry's. There would have been so much more historical and emotional depth. As it is, the strife between Henry and his father, the love that cannot conquer the circumstances it struggles with, as well as how the story ends are all themes that have been written about many, many times before. There was nothing unique here that made me want to keep reading. There was nothing wrong with the book, there just wasn't anything great about it.