February Book Club Meeting
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
by Jamie Ford
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, and 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.
- Synopsis -
March Book Club Meeting
Anne of Green Gables (Tentative)
by L. M. Montgomery
Orphan Anne has always dreamed of being part of a proper family. So when she's chosen to go and live with the Cuthberts, life looks grand. But the Cuthberts wanted a little boy to help them on Green Gables farm, not a girl. They cannot keep her.
- From the Publisher -
April Book Club Meeting
The Hearts of Horses
by Molly Gloss
This breakout novel from the author of The Jump-Off Creek tells the heartwarming story of a determined young woman with a gift for "gentling" wild horses.
May Book Club Meeting
Until They Bring the Streetcars Back
by Stanley Gordon West
Until They Bring The Streetcars Back serves up a nostalgic journey through the streets of post-war 1949 Saint Paul; those wistful days of ten-cent sodas, big band music, and burning leaves. Stanley West weaves rollicking humor, riveting suspense and a bittersweet love story into the fabric of those optimistic times. A harmless prank, a chance conversation and Cal Gant (in the friendly neighborhoods of his idyllic life) stumbles onto the naked face of cruelty, incest and murder. When he attempts to rescue a strange and haunting girl from the slaughterhouse her life has become, he finds himself in a heart-stopping struggle with her ruthless father, leading Cal to the brink of self-doubt, terror and death itself. Can he find within himself the backbone to stand against the horror; the daring to concoct some scheme to set Gretchen free? Until They Bring The Streetcars Back is the gripping story of what Cal does.