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

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Henry also supports his son Marty at college, and welcomes Marty's girlfriend, a non-Chinese girl named Samantha, into their family. Many online reviewers, who know a lot more about World War II than I do, really zoned in on all the the mistakes about the war. It’s about a guy who meets a girl, falls in love with a girl, loses a girl to the Japanese internment and his father’s racism, and moves on to be a good husband to a different woman. 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.

He wonders and starts off on a mission to see if he can track her down or at least find out what happened to her. The novel explores the themes of father–son relationships, and loyalty both in the familial and national contexts.

But Henry is nevertheless bullied by his white classmates and must work long hours in the cafeteria dishing out meals and cleaning up to fulfill the terms of his scholarship. The novel concludes with Henry's son Marty locating Keiko in New York City, and Henry goes to see her.

To some White Americans, there were no differences between the Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans and the enemy Japanese. Keiko and her family are sent to ready-made internment camps where they will stay for the next three years or so.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. It is when Henry’s father finds Keiko’s possessions in his room that he finally stops speaking to him altogether. The author clearly hasn't been able to capture my attention, I am not drawn into the story or the characters and while I really wasn't looking for prose of genius, the are minimum requirements of what I am willing to read. I was really looking forward to this book because it was about a period of US history in World War 2 involving the detention of US citizens of Japanese background which I knew very little about and was looking forward to this read. There have been countless books telling stories about people unable to live out their romances because of prejudices and politics, and in terms of subject matter, this is no different.