Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: The international bestseller and word-of-mouth sensation

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After the devastation of Pearl Harbour, the US government decides to send all the people of Japanese decent to live in internment camps until the war is over.

With a wonderful characterisation, mesmerising relationships, a breathtaking narrative and a story that will most certainly leave you wanting more, Hotel on the corner of Bitter and Sweet is one of my highlights of the year. 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. So while we opened by saying, "Let's talk history," what we really meant was let's talk about the present.On his deathbed, Henry's father insinuates that he had something to do with stopping the correspondence between Henry and Keiko. Henry a twelve year old boy is this and not only do his parents want him to be American and to go to the well known Caucasian school, they want him to only speak English and not Cantonese. Well, war doesn't seem to be going away any time soon—the locations and armies change, but war just keeps coming back. The author had 4 anachronisms: the book is set (in part) in 1986, and yet the son is in an "on-line" grief support group, and used the internet to look up a lost friend, and there is talk twice about digital conversion of records to CDs. 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.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet' is a love story of many things - Seattle, families and people in cultural transition, letting go of beloved traditions, an innocent romance between a boy and a girl - while it also quietly reflects on the failures and stresses behind 'multiculturalism'.

America was created with a written Constitution defining us as a Republic democracy with certain laws.

To some White Americans, there were no differences between the Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans and the enemy Japanese. It’s in no way soppy or sentimental, yet it is a true love story, but also a story that will haunt the reader. Kirkus Reviews hailed the novel as "A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don't repeat those injustices. That friend is Keiko, a Japanese-American girl who lives in Seattle’s Nihonmachi (Japantown) district.

Out walking one day he sees a familiar landmark of his childhood, The Panama Hotel being brought back to life, and from the basement come a number of items from years previous. The bitter aftertaste of how you watch and can do nothing as whole communities are moved and destroyed. He has a strained relationship with his father mirroring that as a grown man in his fiftys he also struggles to open communications with his own grown son Marty.