The efforts of how Henry tried to maintain his connection with Keiko, even visiting her in the camps in disguise, is very touching and well portrayed.

This is an entertaining and often illuminating tale that no doubt will be appearing at a cinema near you soon. Henry never gets over Keiko and when his present wife dies he eventually tracks her down, with the help of his son.I know the Justice Department lied to the Supreme Court about the “known danger” the Japanese-Americans represented. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a beautiful, fascinating, tender and moving story from beginning to end.

A story of lost love, childhood, prejudice and war, but also of endurance and acceptance and resignation that life doesn’t always turn out the way you would want it to. In short, it's the best of times and the worst of times for Henry and Keiko, and we get to experience it all without risking our own precious little hearts. After years of getting comments and feedback on this review, I will take the time to edit it for two important details. I think Henry and Keiko are two of the most engaging characters I've come across in a long while and I will not soon forget them, nor Sheldon, the saxophone player who befreinds them. This was a love story with a few historical facts thrown in to keep you interested but not the read I thought it would be.The treatment of the Japanese people, the internment camps and the subsequent loss of identity is a terrible thing, yet the stoicism and acceptance of the people shines through in this story – the whole book captures the resilience of humans. I suspect it’s one of those books that attempts to mine those “rich veins of ordinary life” I hear that non-genre literature is lovingly mining. Doing this while an ongoing war has intensified panic and fear Henry is lucky to find two mentors - a Black man and a White woman - who allow him the space and support he needs to become a liberal American-Chinese adult father.

Published in 2009, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a tale of first love and loss (hence the sweetness and the bitterness), revolving around a Chinese American boy named Henry Lee who grows up in the midst of World War II and falls in love with a Japanese American girl named Keiko Okabe.Likewise, to many immigrant first-generation Chinese-Americans, all Japanese were enemies since Japan had been slaughtering Chinese in China for a decade, long before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. I really feel the author had the outline of a great plot but was unable to fill out this story as it lacked so much, it needed more emotion, and a lot more punch. World War II caused prejudices to explode within and without the enclaves, both from national patriotism and personal considerations. It meant he had to communicate in sign language with his parents, except on occasion when he had to translate for them. Camps were set up with barbed wire that were meant to protect the people within from those who wanted to hurt them.

See, Jamie Ford came up with the idea for his debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, from a story his father told about growing up during World War II.It gave an interesting insight into the Chinese views of the war, along with the effects, and the aftermath, of the Japanese internment on the Seattle area.