Download Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: A Novel AudioBook Free
In the starting web pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Nice, Henry Lee comes after a crowd obtained outside the Panama Hotel, after the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It's been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible finding: the things of Japanese people, left when these were curved up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry appears on, the owner starts a Japanese parasol.
This simple function needs old Henry Lee back again to the 1940s, at the elevation of the conflict, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of distress and excitement, and also to his father, who is enthusiastic about the conflict in China and having Henry increase up North american. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where in fact the white kids dismiss him, Henry satisfies Keiko Okabe, a Japanese American college student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a relationship of camaraderie–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices with their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are embroiled in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are kept only with the expectation that the conflict will end, which their promises to one another will be placed.
Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. Inside the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs or symptoms of the Okabe family’s things and for a long-lost thing whose value he cannot start to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still looking for his words–words that may explain the activities of his nationalistic daddy; words that may bridge the difference between him and his modern, Chinese American kid; words that may help him confront the options he made many years in the past.
Place during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Nice can be an extraordinary report of commitment and enduring trust. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has generated an remarkable duo whose report educates us of the power of forgiveness and the individual heart and soul.
"Sentimental, heartfelt….the exploration of Henry’s changing romance with his family and with Keiko could keep most viewers turning web pages...A well-timed debut that not only reminds viewers of any shameful instance in American history, but cautions us to look at the present and take heed we don’t duplicate those injustices."-- Kirkus Reviews
“A sensitive and satisfying novel set in a period and a place lost forever, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Nice gives us a glimpse of the damage that is brought on by war--not the sweeping damage of the battlefield, but the cold, cruel harm to the hearts and humanity of specific people. Especially relevant in today's world, this is a beautifully written booklet that will make you think. And, moreover, it will cause you to feel."
-- Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling writer of The Art of Sporting in the Rainfall
“Jamie Ford's first novel explores the age-old issues between daddy and son, the wonder and sadness of what took place to Japanese Us citizens in the Seattle area during World War II, and the depths and longing of deep-heart love. An impressive, bitter, and great debut.”
-- Lisa See, bestselling writer of Snow Blossom and the trick Fan
