Jamie Ford – She Reads Novels

William Eng has spent the last five years of his life in the care of the nuns at Seattle’s Sacred Heart Orphanage. It’s 1934 and living conditions at the orphanage are very poor, particularly for William who is Chinese-American and considered inferior to most of the other children. But William is not at all sure that he is actually an orphan – although he has never known his father, the last time he saw his mother she was being carried out of their apartment by a doctor, promising that she’d be coming back soon.

On William’s twelfth birthday he and the other boys are taken to see a film as a special treat and William becomes convinced that one of the actresses he sees on the screen, Willow Frost, is his mother. With the help of his best friend, a blind girl called Charlotte, he sets out to find Willow Frost in the hope that she can answer the question that has been troubling him for five years – what can lead a mother to abandon her child?

Having loved Jamie Ford’s previous novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, I was looking forward to reading this one. If anything, this book was even more ‘bitter and sweet’ than the first! At times it was so sad that I wasn’t sure if I could bear to continue reading, but even while my heart was breaking for William and his mother it was obvious that they loved each other and that gave me a glimmer of hope. I wanted them to find the happiness they deserved and that was what kept me turning the pages.

Although we begin in 1934 with William in search of Willow Frost, at least half of the novel is actually set several years earlier in 1921 and follows the story of the young Willow – or Liu Song as she was originally known. It was the 1921 section of the story that I found particularly upsetting to read; being Chinese, a woman and unmarried, life is not easy for Liu Song and it seems that every bad thing that could possibly happen to her does happen. While her stepfather, Uncle Leo, is the villain of the book, I was equally furious with the attitude of a social worker who supposedly had William’s best interests at heart but was clearly only concerned with punishing his mother for what she claimed was immoral behaviour.

Despite the overwhelming sadness, I enjoyed Songs of Willow Frost. There are some great descriptions of Seattle in the 1920s and 1930s and we are given some fascinating insights into the city’s Chinese community and the lives of people struggling to survive during the Depression. I didn’t find this book quite as satisfying as Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and there were one or two aspects of the plot that didn’t resolve the way I would have liked them to but overall I thought this was a wonderfully poignant and moving story.

Thanks to Lovereading for the review copy

One day in 1986 Henry Lee stands outside Seattle’s Panama Hotel. The building is being renovated and has been opened up for the first time in over forty years. As Henry watches, a number of items are carried up to the street. These things belonged to the Japanese American families who were ‘evacuated’ from their homes during the second world war. They had stored their possessions in the hotel basement but never came back to reclaim them. This is an important historical discovery, but for Henry it also has personal significance as it brings back memories of one particular Japanese family and a girl called Keiko…

Henry and Keiko are both just twelve years old when they become friends in 1942. He is the only Chinese boy and she the only Japanese girl in an all-white school. Unfortunately Henry’s father disapproves of their relationship – China and Japan have been involved in conflict for years and he considers all Japanese people to be the enemy. And with Pearl Harbor still fresh in people’s minds, Japan is America’s enemy too. Henry’s parents make him wear an “I am Chinese” button when he goes out in case anyone mistakes him for a Japanese boy. When the US government decide to round up thousands of Japanese people and send them to internment camps (allegedly to stop them from spying) Henry and Keiko find themselves separated.

The story of Henry and Keiko’s love and the fate of America’s Japanese population is just one part of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet; the book also looks at the difficult relationship between Henry and his father, racial tensions in the 1940s, the Seattle jazz scene and the importance of music in our lives. The novel is heartbreaking in places and heartwarming in others (the ‘bitter and sweet’ of the title), yet it never became too sentimental for me. It’s a lovely, tender, moving story from beginning to end, but at the same time it’s a story that helps to educate the reader about an aspect of World War II that rarely seems to be given any attention today. I feel ashamed that I knew nothing about the way Japanese American people were treated during the war and I’m pleased that this gap in my knowledge has now been rectified somewhat.

So many of the books I’ve read recently have dual timeframes. In this book the narrative is split between 1942 and 1986, but for once I found both periods equally compelling to read about. As for the characters, the good ones are very good and the bad ones are very bad, yet they still feel like real, believable people rather than two-dimensional stereotypes. I really loved both Henry and Keiko. They were characters I genuinely cared about and I felt emotionally invested in their story, rather than just being a passive observer. And someone else who deserves a mention is Sheldon, a black saxophone player who becomes a friend of Henry’s, the type of friend I think we would all like to have!

As you might have guessed by now, I really loved this book – and I think it might even be one of my favourite books of the year so far. I had added it to my wish list as soon as it started appearing on so many American book blogs a couple of years ago and now that I’ve finally had a chance to read it for myself I’m so glad it was as good as I’d hoped it would be!