Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
In 1986, 56-year-old widower Henry Lee watches a crew open the boarded-up basement of the Panama Hotel in Seattle, where Japanese American families had stored their belongings before being shipped to internment camps in 1942. The recovered trunks pull Henry back into his thirteen-year-old self, the only Chinese American student at his all-white school, and into his friendship with Keiko Okabe, the Japanese American girl he ate lunch with in the alley behind the cafeteria. The book moves between 1942 and 1986, tracing Henry's first love, the fracture with his father, the executive order that sent Keiko's family to Camp Minidoka, and the secret Henry has carried for forty-four years.
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A Seattle widower opens a boarded-up hotel basement in 1986 and is pulled back to his 1942 first love with a Japanese American girl shipped to an internment camp.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is fictional but built around the real history of Japanese American internment during World War II and the Panama Hotel in Seattle, where many internees stored their belongings.
Yes. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is appropriate for readers 13 and up. It is widely taught in middle school and high school classrooms studying World War II and the Japanese American internment.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet was written by Jamie Ford, published in 2009 by Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is 308 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a standalone novel by Jamie Ford, not part of a series.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.