Another book club

I recently attended my second new book club meeting with a group of women who have met monthly for a few years. They have great taste in books and are reading many of the things I've either just read or plan to soon, so I decided to join up with them.

Last week I attended my first meeting where we discussed Jamie Ford's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. I had picked up the paperback a few months ago when I was visiting my favorite bookstore, Quail Ridge Books. It caught my eye as the setting is Seattle, one of the two places my husband and I visited on our honeymoon.

Hotel is a beautifully layered love story, told from two time periods 40 years apart. It tells readers a lot about Seattle in the 1940s, evacuation of Japanese Americans during World War II to camps, tensions between the Chinese and Japanese around the same time and how different generations can struggle to identify themselves ethnically. Four things I didn't know too much about before reading. This is one of the best books I've read all year.

Here's what the Book Lady had to say about it a few months ago. She's on my regular blog-reading rotation. Here's a link to the Author Jamie Ford's home page. I can't wait for him to write something else for me to read.