Yet Another A Painful Part of Our History

Hotel On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet - Jamie Ford
Originally published in hardcover in 2009 - Ballantine

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I struggled with this one. Such good and such bad all mixed into one. 


First the good. The subject matter is heart wrenching. But necessary. I read Farewell to Manzanar in school and this is in a way the novelized version.  This should be required reading in American History classes.  Something I don’t usually pay attention to yet was well done in this book is the plot structure – my hat goes off to Mr. Ford with his debut novel.  Perhaps unfairly, I kept going back to both the author’s and the main character’s ethnicity as Chinese Americans and marveling at the  treatment of Japanese American history – sooooo beautifully done. 


The Bad.  And there is only one thing. As I mentioned above, this book should be required reading in our schools. BUT I had a very difficult time with the voice – the book/tone/voice seems in many places written to a young adult audience.  It felt at times Lemony Snickety with its slowed pace to help the reader along, which I found to be quite unnecessary. 


Publisher's Weekly description - Ford's strained debut concerns Henry Lee, a Chinese-American in Seattle who, in 1986, has just lost his wife to cancer. After Henry hears that the belongings of Japanese immigrants interned during WWII have been found in the basement of the Panama Hotel, the narrative shuttles between 1986 and the 1940s in a predictable story that chronicles the losses of old age and the bewilderment of youth. Henry recalls the difficulties of life in America during WWII, when he and his Japanese-American school friend, Keiko, wandered through wartime Seattle. Keiko and her family are later interned in a camp, and Henry, horrified by America's anti-Japanese hysteria, is further conflicted because of his Chinese father's anti-Japanese sentiment. Henry's adult life in 1986 is rather mechanically rendered, and Ford clumsily contrasts Henry's difficulty in communicating with his college-age son, Marty, with Henry's own alienation from his father, who was determined to Americanize him. The wartime persecution of Japanese immigrants is presented well, but the flatness of the narrative and Ford's reliance on numerous cultural cliches make for a disappointing read. (Feb.) 
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