Brunch & Books: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Are you a Needle who reads for pleasure and wants to connect with others to discuss books and build friendships? Join us for our monthly book club exploring various genres, mostly fiction.

This month's book is Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (2009, 368 pages, ISBN 9780345505347). Available via Libby (Fulton County and Sequoyah systems).

In 1986, Henry Lee joins a crowd outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has discovered the belongings of Japanese families who were sent to internment camps during World War II. As the owner displays and unfurls a Japanese parasol, Henry, a Chinese American, remembers a young Japanese American girl from his childhood in the 1940s—Keiko Okabe, with whom he forged a bond of friendship and innocent love that transcended the prejudices of their Old World ancestors. After Keiko and her family were evacuated to the internment camps, she and Henry could only hope that their promise to each other would be kept. Now, forty years later, Henry explores the hotel’s basement for the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot even begin to measure. His search will take him on a journey to revisit the sacrifices he has made for family, for love, for country.