springdellgirl

Book Club Hangover



This morning I have what I like to call a "book club hangover". Last night was book club at my friend Valynn's house and I stayed too late, ate too much, laughed very hard, and over shared...as usual. :) I then came home in the wee hours of the morning and proceeded to talk to Tyler for quite a while longer and then couldn't drag my butt out of bed to go to the gym this morning. As a result, I feel fat, lazy, and tired. But...I had a lot of fun last night so it was worth it!!

Our book for this month was Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. I was underwhelmed. I found it to be a snooze. This book has some things going for it: an interesting premise, set in Seattle, a sweet tale, nothing raunchy...very clean, you could recommend it to anyone and not worry about them being offended in any way. Maybe that was the problem for me. It was too sweet or more to the point it was too saccharine. I just didn't really get into it and didn't think the characters were well developed and fully fleshed out. That said I thought some of the secondary characters were much more fascinating than the main characters. I loved Sheldon and that crusty old chain smoking lunch lady. I wanted this book to do more, be more, delve deeper and it didn't. I also didn't care for the ending which was predictably dull. On a positive note, the story dealt with interesting subject matter from an uncommon perspective.

From School Library Journal

"Henry Lee is a 12-year-old Chinese boy who falls in love with Keiko Okabe, a 12-year-old Japanese girl, while they are scholarship students at a prestigious private school in World War II Seattle. Henry hides the relationship from his parents, who would disown him if they knew he had a Japanese friend. His father insists that Henry wear an "I am Chinese" button everywhere he goes because Japanese residents of Seattle have begun to be shipped off by the thousands to relocation centers. This is an old-fashioned historical novel that alternates between the early 1940s and 1984, after Henry's wife Ethel has died of cancer. "

Unfortunately for me, the novel didn't live up to it's pretty cover and catchy title.

My rating: OK