Meet fun ladies who enjoy wine, chocolates,
appetizers – and, oh yes, a good book!
We laugh, we catch up and we discuss the
plot line, characters, and motives within the
book.
Join us on Wednesday, February 25, 2015,
from 7 to 10 p.m. at the home of Jennifer
LaDuke, 1300 Garden Street, as we catch
up, eat, enjoy a glass (or two or three!) of
wine and discuss the following book.
Book Selection:
In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning
debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and
Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd
gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the
gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been
boarded up for decades, but now the new
owner has made an incredible discovery:
the belongings of Japanese families, left when
they were rounded up and sent to internment
camps during World War II. As Henry looks
on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.
This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to
the 1940s, at the height of the war, when
young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion
and excitement, and to his father, who is
obsessed with the war in China and having
Henry grow up American. While
“scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier
Elementary, where the white kids ignore him,
Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese
American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts,
curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge
a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that
transcends the long-standing prejudices of
their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko
and her family are swept up in the evacuations
to the internment camps, she and Henry are
left only with the hope that the war will end, a
nd that their promise to each other will be kept.
Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the
parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark
dusty basement he begins looking for signs of
the Okabe family’s belongings and for a
long-lost object whose value he cannot begin
to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still
trying to find his voice–words that might
explain the actions of his nationalistic father;
words that might bridge the gap between him
and his modern, Chinese American son; words
that might help him confront the choices he
made many years ago.
Set during one of the most conflicted and
volatile times in American history, Hotel on
the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an
extraordinary story of commitment and
enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie
Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose
story teaches us of the power of forgiveness
and the human heart.
