Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

In the opening pages of Jamie Ford's stunning novel, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattles' 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 Henry back to the 1940s, when his world was a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who was obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American.  While "scholarshipping" at the exclusive Ranier 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.  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 and that their promise to each other will be kept.

Forty years later, Henry Lee, certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko, searches the hotel's dark, dusty basement for signs of the Okabe family's belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot even 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.

I read this book for our Book Club and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Even though it is fiction, I learned a lot about a time in American history which wasn't taught much when I studied American history in school.  The Japanese internment camps were glossed over as though they were something of which Americans were not proud.  I also found myself relating to the universal theme of people being afraid of those who are different, whether they be blacks, Mormons, American Indians, even someone who is different in an elementary school class -- and the persecutions that result because of the fear of those differences.

Midwife's Apprentice by Karen Cushman

This is a quick read and even won the Newbery award.  The little no-one no-named orphan girl gets taken in by a midwife to do menial tasks in exchange for food and shelter. Over time the girl (who has named herself Alyce) learns skills and tries her hand at doing what the midwife does.  It's a good book about belonging and finding purpose in life despite the difficulties that seem to be in our way.

Learning to Fly

This is an amazing book by Roxanne Henke about what it means to be a mom, when and how you learn what to do as a parent, limits to set or ignore, etc. It follows two women who have little girls at the same time, and goes through the girls' lives through high school graduation. It is told from the mothers' varying points of view and truly made me think about my parenting style and what I should or shouldn't do. My only wish was that she would write a similar story with the children being boys because many of the challenges that the daughters faced were more girl-centered (gossip, peer pressure to look a certain way, curfew, drill team, etc.) than perhaps some of the more boy-centered ones (pornography) that I worry about for my sons. But it was a very good read!