Hotel at the corner of Bitter and Sweet

Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford is a beautifully written story. It begins in 1986 when Henry Lee spots the belongings of some Japanese American families being brought up from the basement of Seattle's Panama Hotel where they had been stored for over 40 years. The families had been sent to internment camps during WW II and had never returned. Lee sees a parasol that he thinks may have belonged to a young girl who had been very special to him when they were young. The story travels back to the 1940s when Lee was growing up with his Chinese parents who so desperately wished for him to be American and who wanted him to have nothing to do with the japanese in the next neighborhood. The book seamlessly flows back and forth in time showing the war years and Lee as an adult widower and father searching for an elusive jazz record and for the belongings of his first love. I really liked this book and almost hated for it to end as I had gotten lost in the story.