Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford is a wonderful debut novel of star-crossed teenage romance during World War II. Growing up in Seattle, twelve-year-old Chinese-American Henry Lee and Japanese-American Keiko Okabe are the only Asian-American students at their school, subjected to the pervasive racism of the day. After Pearl Harbor, Keiko, her family, and other local Japanese-Americans are harassed, rounded up, and then interned in government concentration camps. Henry desperately tries to help Keiko and her family even as he struggles with his father's own anti-Japanese bigotry. At times the novel goes a bit Nicholas Sparks, but I found Jamie Ford's depiction of Chinese-American culture and the description of Seattle in the early 1940s at the outbreak of the war to be powerful and convincing. This is a lovely and moving novel and a stern corrective to those who romanticize the "good old days" of what this country was like for non-"whites."