Jamie Ford’s first novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is set in Seattle during World War II and tells the story of a friendship that develops between a Chinese boy and a Japanese girl during the internment of Japanese Americans.
The good: The writing is good. The story is told in flashbacks, and Ford does a good job taking the reader from WWII to present day without causing whiplash. The story is intriguing, and Ford made me aware of some aspects of WWII that I didn’t know much about.
The bad:. Many of the characterizations were either flat or inconsistent. The good guys were thoroughly good, and the bad guys were thoroughly bad. Most people aren’t that one-dimensional. Since the story is told in flashbacks, you know from the beginning how things are going to end. During the last third of the book, however, the author either relied on plot devices so overused that most book publishers warn against them in their submission guidelines, or had characters acting in ways that didn’t ring true. It was almost as if Ford wanted so badly to keep the ending from being predictable that he made it unbelievable.
Final grade: B. The writing was so good that I’ll forgive plot weaknesses. If you’re only going to read one book about the problems between 1st and 2nd generation Asian Americans, read The Joy Luck Club. But this is a rich subject that can be visited in more than one way by more than one author.
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The ending was certainly predictable but you’re so right, the joy of the book is in the telling.