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Reader recommendation: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

  • By Mary Lou McKibben, Albuquerque, N.M.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford, is a touching historical novel of young love and parental demands as experienced by a Chinese boy and Japanese girl in grade school in Seattle when all Japanese on the West Coast, citizens or not, were evacuated and relocated in 1942.  The story begins in 1986 with flashbacks to this tragic decision and its effects. There are still many Americans who have little knowledge of this event.  When I lived there in Seattle in 1942 I had a Japanese friend and her family who experienced this and I visited them on the other side of the "holding" area at the Fairgrounds. This is a piece of history which should be better known.

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