I love to read.  So much so that it bears saying again.  I love, love, love to read!!  I’ve looked for a book club to join for a while now and I haven’t found anything so I thought what better than an online book club.

I’ve been wanting to do this forever.  In fact it’s one of the major reasons I started my blog.  So here’s to our first inaugural meeting!!

Here’s the rules: {although I am so laid back that I hate to have rules at all}

I will announce the Book Club selection around the first of the month and give us until the end of the month to read it.

We will hold discussions in the comments about the book.  I will provide some questions but feel free to go off script.

If you have a suggestion for a book selection for us please email me by clicking here or using the contact me button up top.

This book club will be very informal.  I want it to be about the joy of reading and discovering literary treasures.

So without further ado, our First Book Club Selection is:

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

by Jamie Ford

**warning plot synopsis coming.  If you are like me and don’t like to go into a book knowing anything about it then please skip the next 3 paragraphs**

In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.

This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.

Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago.

I absolutely fell in love with this book.  And it remains one of my very favorites.  I am so very excited to have it as our first Book Club Selection.  Be sure to check back here for the Meeting at the end of April.  Happy Reading!!

Please click here to see all the awesome blogs I am linking to!!

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