Recent Reviews
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Jamie Ford’s perfectly titled book, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, inspired and touched me. Based on historical facts, the novel is about a middle-aged man reflecting on his childhood in Seattle during World War II. While in grammar school, Henry Lee becomes fast friends with Keiko Okabe and they bond over their non-Caucasian identities. Henry is Chinese and Keiki is Japanese, a not so remarkable fact in 2017, but a defining one in the 1940’s. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States government orders more than 125,000 Japanese-Americans to be “evacuated” from the Coast to ensure they are not spying for the Japanese. Distraught and confused by the edict, Henry races to the train station to see Keiko before she departs. Henry says, “Each person wore a plain white tag, the kind you’d see on a piece of furniture, dangling from a coat button." This description is a powerful reminder of how fear and racism can result in cruelty and injustice. Keiko and her family are taken first to a temporary relocation center outside of Seattle, and then to a permanent relocation center in Idaho. Possessions of the Japanese families were left at the Panama Hotel, a gateway between Chinatown and Japantown. (The hotel still operates today.)
Henry misses Keiko and feels the eeriness of her nearby empty neighborhood without the Japanese families. Henry’s immigrant parents don’t understand Henry. They simply want him to be perceived as American. When Henry wants to take a bus to visit Keiko in Idaho, Henry knows his parents will be opposed. Henry’s mother says, “You, me, all of us risk going to jail if we help them. I know you have a friend. The one she calls on the telephone. The one from the Rainer School? She is Japanese.” Henry worries about Keiko and wonders how she would cope if she were sent back to Japan; Keiko doesn’t even speak Japanese. Henry navigates his way to see Keiko and her family. They exchange long letters for months until eventually the letters mysteriously stop and they lose touch. Henry stays in Seattle, falls in love, marries, and has a son. Henry has made a sweet life from a bitter circumstance.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is rich with history; jazz, multiculturalism, an eclectic cast of characters and several plot twists. It explores racism and xenophobia and the painful distance that can exist between immigrant parents and their American offspring. At its heart, this novel is a story about Henry and Keiko’s love in the midst of WWII when they were powerless to affect the trajectory of their lives. The book also explores Henry’s journey toward an understanding of the frailties, vulnerabilities and complexity of his parents whose rigidity and fear hurt him. Though Henry did not have the life he envisioned with Keiko, he exhibits restraint, kindness, and a generosity of spirit. And after his beloved wife Ethel dies of cancer, Henry visits the dilapidated Panama Hotel and finds a couple of Keiko’s possessions in its basement. He wonders where she might be living. Without spoiling the ending, I will say that as I finished the last page, I hoped that Jamie Ford was working on a sequel.
The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer
Published in 2002, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer is a rich exploration of the emotional dynamics of a young couple, their families, and their group of childhood friends after a traumatic accident. Packer creates characters for which I feel great empathy as they attempt to deal with a tragic situation. Her book reminds us that impulsive actions can change a person’s life.
Mike Mayer and Carrie Bell have lived in Madison their entire lives. They met at 15 and have been dating through high school and then four years at the university. Both are kind and conscientious. Their relationship has been one of thoughtfulness and tenderness. Now engaged, Carrie deflects and delays each time Mike asks about selecting a date. Not without inner conflict, she says, “I was hating myself because none of it felt right anymore. For so long I had thought of him as necessary ballast that would keep me safe. Now that ballast was holding me down, holding me back. I wanted lightness, freedom.” She also explains the stifling feeling she carries about their life in Madison, “We might work at banks and libraries and car dealerships but somehow the trappings of adulthood were merely that for us, merely trappings: the truth about us seemed to lie in the fact that we were still closest to the people we’d known since childhood." Feeling constrained by the confines of her hometown, Carrie imagines a wider world filled with stimulation and unpredictability. She has been emotionally distancing herself from the people she loves.
Mike feels Carrie’s love ebbing. On a picnic with their friends, Mike attempts to get Carrie’s attention by making an uncharacteristically spontaneous dive into a familiar lake. The water level is low and tragedy strikes. Mike becomes paralyzed.
The novel explores how people respond to their responsibilities in a time of crisis and chaos. As Mike deals with his physical paralysis, Carries becomes emotionally paralyzed. Everyone in her life tells her to be strong for Mike. A few months after the accident and burdened by constant hospital visits, Carrie feels the weight of Mike’s accident crushing her and she impulsively leaves Madison for New York. Though young, impetuous, and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of her heart, she needs to get away from the shrinking world of Madison to sort her feelings. Carrie loves Mike and she wants to support him. Yet, should she be disloyal to her own desires and simply marry him? Except for her mom, few people in her tight circle knew of her diminished feelings toward Mike. They think she simply left Mike in his time of need.
Carrie doesn’t offer the insights of an older, wiser woman. Yet, I admire that she seeks to understand herself and reflect on the choices she made and why she thinks she made them. She struggles to imagine if it would be harder to stay with her quadriplegic fiancé or harder to abandon him when he needs her most. And she berates herself for even thinking about leaving him. She wonders how, prior to the accident, Mike could have felt so content with the predictability of their planned lives. She reviews her own father’s abandonment of her mother when Carrie was three.
Carrie has experienced a different kind of trauma. She is only 23 years old. But rather than shrink from pain and conflict, she attempts to search her soul and determine what she should do next. Packer doesn’t offer us a simple happy ending. But like the rest of the book, it is satisfying to watch Carrie wrestle with the complexity of her commitments, her conflicts, and her emerging consciousness.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
Paulette Jiles' impressive novel, News of the World, was a 2016 National Book Award finalist and I can see why. Set in 1870 in North Texas, Jiles’ precise prose captivated me with her tale of emotional endurance and human connection. Captain Jefferson Kidd of Georgia is a veteran of two wars. He travels town to town to read the news of the world to assembled crowds. It is a meager living, but in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Captain lost both his print shop and his faith in humanity. He has witnessed both the noble and savage impulses of his fellow human beings and he now hopes, “If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place."
In Wichita Falls, Texas, he is offered a fifty-dollar gold piece to return a ten-year-old girl to her relatives 400 miles south in San Antonio. The Kiowa tribe raised the girl, named Johanna Leonberger, after they murdered her parents and sister. She now embodies the culture and language of the tribe. Yet four years later, to the dismay of her adopted Kiowa mother, the tribe returns Johanna to the US Army. She has been abandoned twice now and has learned to behave with courage and resiliency. Jiles bases this piece of the story on first hand accounts of children captured and raised by Native American tribes. She specifically notes Scott Zesch’s book, Captured.
The Captain and Johanna embark on a grueling and emotional journey. They initially view each other with alarm and caution. Captain Kidd is no child psychologist, but he is a kind and honest man who seeks to comprehend this young girl whose only language is Kiowa. As they travel together, the weary old man and the wary young girl endure outlaws, hostile tribes, and a corrupt Reconstructionist government. And they begin to communicate and appreciate one another. Toward the end of the novel Jiles writes, “The Captain never did understand what had caused such a total change in a little girl from a German household and adopted into a Kiowa one. In a mere four years she completely forgot her birth language and her parents, her people, her religion, her alphabet. She forgot how to use a knife and a fork and how to sing in European scales. And once she was returned to her own people, nothing came back. She remained at heart a Kiowa to the end of her days.”
Though Captain Kidd may not understand Johanna, he accepts her and attempts to put himself in her shoes. Johanna refuses to be “civilized” into the customs and habits of the white world, though on occasion acquiesces in deference to the Captain. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say it is gratifying. Given our country’s current callousness and cruelty toward those who are different, I thoroughly enjoyed being with Captain Jefferson Kidd. Though he could have taken advantage of the anarchy and chaos around him, he lived his days with compassion, decency, and honor.
