Reviews with content warning for Bullying - Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Reviews tagging 'Bullying'

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

7 reviews

leahthebooklover's review against another edition

emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

Bitter and Sweet pretty much describes my experience with this book, leaning more towards the sweet. It was a fairly straightforward, dual timeline love story between star-crossed Henry, a Chinese-American boy, and Keiko, a Japanese-American girl. The story alternates between 1986, and the war years of 1942-1945. Caught up in an age old ethnic rivalries, racial prejudice, and the Japanese xenophobia that was prevalent during WW2, Henry and Keiko's friendship flourishes in spite of these challenges. Eventually they are separated when her family is deported from Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. The second timeline reveals what happened to Henry after he lost touch with Keiko, and how that loss affected him. There are a lot of complex issues touched upon in this book, but nothing is explored very deeply. In the author's note Mr. Ford states that "I did my best to recreate this historic landscape without judging the good or bad intentions of those involved at the time. My intent was not to create a morality play, with my voice being the loudest on the stage, but rather to defer to the reader's sense of justice, of right and wrong, and let the facts speak plainly." I was drawn into Henry and Keiko's story, and the sense of time and place in the earlier timeline. The injustices suffered by Japanese-American citizens, particularly their loss of home, property, livelihood, and sometimes family (apparently some families were split up and sent to different internment camps) was heartbreaking. The later (1986) timeline didn't quite capture me in the same way, but served as a framework or foundation for the central story. There were some odd anachronisms regarding Internet usage in the 1986 storyline, which struck me as odd, but not enough to disrupt my engagement with the story. Overall a solid read.

Content Warnings