Book review: HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET by Jamie Ford

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

By Jamie Ford

Ballantine Books

301 pp

Predictable but sweet

What this book accomplishes is painting a vivid picture of the post-Pearl Harbor dynamic on the West coast, particularly within the international district in Seattle. But if you’re looking for a unique plotline, you may be disappointed.

But despite the predictable nature of the Japanese-Chinese Romeo-and-Juliet-type story, this novel is a quick and worthwhile read if you like sweetheart stories and happy endings. Definitely no star-crossed suicides here.

Henry, a Chinese boy, and Keiko, a Japanese girl, both earn scholarships to an all-white middle school, an honor for their respective parents hoping to raise American children. Though Henry’s family vehemently hates the Japanese for their nation’s war against the Chinese homeland and forces Henry to wear a button declaring “I am Chinese,” Henry is captivated by his new friend, whom he bonds during their daily work-study—serving cafeteria slop to the white kids in the school.

Their budding friendship and innocent romance is pre-maturely ripped apart by the US directive to round up all Japanese for internment camps, American citizens or not. But in the most unlikely ways, Henry is able to seek her out when Keiko’s family is first shipped to Camp Hope, the interim facility at the state fairgrounds where whole families live in individual livestock stalls, and then later finds her in the 10,000-person plus containment city in middle-of-nowhere Idaho.

So Henry successfully professes his love and vows to wait for her release, but what would cross-culture, long-distance love be without the ignorant meddling by a disapproving parent, one of the books many clichés.  

But despite Henry and Keiko’s formulaic relationship, one character does intrigue—Sheldon, the street-performing sax player who takes Henry under his wing. Sheldon gives dimension to the story, not only through the metaphorical broken record-recording of his performance at the Black Elks Club, but by giving the reader a vision of little known jazz history. By the end of the novel, readers should be able to hear the music that brings all three characters together in their own melting-pot friendships.