Category: Review

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Jamie Ford’s first novel, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” is an endearing story of young love divided by familial differences. The only problem is, we’ve all heard this same story before, and Ford’s rendition does little to improve the careworn motif.

The book begins in 1986 Seattle, several months after the death of Henry Lee’s wife. He is learning to cope with his loneliness in quiet comfort, but a chance occurrence serves to bring back long-avoided questions regarding Henry’s first love.

The hotel of the title is the real Panama Hotel, and as Henry walks by one day, he happens across the discovery of a generation of Japanese families’ most precious possessions, entrusted to the hotel for safekeeping during their wartime internment and left untouched for 40 years. The unexpected appearance of this time capsule plunges Henry back into memories of his childhood and his long-lost first love.

Twelve year-old Henry Lee is struggling with the challenges of growing up Chinese in America. His father, a fanatical Chinese nationalist, has forbidden Henry to speak anything but English, creating a nearly insurmountable language barrier between Henry and his Cantonese-speaking parents. These same parents are extremely proud to tell their friends that their only son is the beneficiary of a scholarship to an all-white elementary school, carefully overlooking the fact that his Chinese contemporaries refuse to speak to him, and he usually evinces signs of physical bullying at the hands of his white classmates. Through all this, Henry maintains a sort of aloof calm, indulging only his love of jazz music as an escape from the unpleasantness of his day-to-day existence. But, of course, everything changes when a new girl arrives at school.

Said new girl is the precocious Keiko Okabe, who, despite her Japanese heritage, proudly refers to herself as an American. Like Henry, Keiko comports herself with a maturity unexpected in someone her age, and the two form an immediate bond as the only scholarship children at their school. Henry is petrified that his bigoted father will discover his friendship with a Japanese girl and goes to great lengths to keep their relationship a secret. Keiko tries gently to impart some of her own self-confidence in Henry, teaching him that his parents’ history is only part of the person he can become.

Inevitably, Keiko’s very happy Japanese-American family is shipped off to an internment camp, and the young Henry is distraught. Daring his family’s disapproval, he makes multiple illicit visits while they are being held in a nearby interim camp, but as the family is relocated, he and Keiko are truly separated, and their burgeoning love is tested.

As is typical in stories built around the “Romeo and Juliet” archetype of forbidden love, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” speaks to love’s power to overcome the tests of distance and time. However, Ford’s characters hardly command the attention and respect of their audience in the way their precursors do, and the book falls flat.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Eleanor Brown’s debut novel, “The Weird Sisters,” attempts to bring the language of and love for Shakespeare to a more mainstream audience. The title is an allusion to the witches of “Macbeth,” and the connections do not end there.

The story revolves around the lives of the three grown Andreas sisters. Their father, a professor specializing in Shakespeare at a small liberal arts college in Ohio, has named them each after one of the Bard’s heroines, and each suffers under the weight of her namesake’s legacy. The eldest, Rosalind (“As You Like It”), feels enormous pressure to find her Orlando. Although she is happily engaged to a fellow professor, she balks at the idea of change, hating the notion of feeling unneeded after a lifetime of being responsible. She leaps at the opportunity afforded by their mother’s newfound breast cancer to move back in and care for her. She must eventually face her fear of moving outside of her own comfort zone or lose her fiancé.

The second sister, Bianca (“The Taming of the Shrew”), called Bean by her family, has no trouble finding a date but realizes that her glittering New York City life is empty when she is abruptly fired from her job on grounds of financial fraud. A failure, she slinks back home, making the excuse of helping the family when she is in actuality licking her wounds and attempting to extricate herself from the crushing dual burden of her debt and her guilt.

The youngest of the three is predictably named after King Lear’s favorite daughter Cordelia and is called Cordy. She is a lovable college dropout, nearing 30 but still following bands and living a carefree nomadic lifestyle until she realizes she has accidentally become pregnant. Never having dealt with any real repercussions for her irresponsibility, she too returns home under the guise of helping her mother cope, while really seeking solace and guidance for herself.

Throughout Brown’s novel, the family members quote Shakespeare back and forth to each other, alluding to the works in a way which, though certainly clever, eventually becomes tiresome. Though Brown clearly has a firm grasp of the Bard’s vernacular, the overall effect feels somewhat forced. The book’s plot, simple enough that it should work well, is tired and, at times, unbelievably cliché. As Bean chases a married man, Rose obsesses over the idea that her family may not need her as much as she needs them, and Cordy falls conveniently in love with a local businessman she knows from her college days who is fine with dating a pregnant woman.

“The Weird Sisters” is by no means a bad book, but at times it suffers from its constant internal comparisons to Shakespeare’s works. Still, Brown delivers a diverting read and, as expected, all’s well that end’s well by the novel’s finish.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth book, “The Hand That First Held Mine,” artfully melds two stories into one elegant novel: the first the history of Lexie Sinclair, a young woman blossoming in postwar London; the second that of Elina and Ted, a young couple introduced just after the birth of their first child, set fifty years after Lexie’s story.

Lexie makes her entrance in a burst of passion while fighting with her mother in rural Devon. After having been politely asked to leave her university, Lexie is displeased to find herself returned to the stagnation of her childhood home, bogged down by whining siblings and her patently boring life. Luckily for her, at this precise moment, the dashing, flamboyantly-attired Innes Kent appears, his car having broken down nearby. He immediately likes Lexie, and his well-timed arrival imbues Lexie with the courage to escape the stifling mediocrity ascribed to her in Devon. Without much of a plan, Lexie packs a bag and heads off to London, much to her family’s disapprobation, but with the promise of guidance from the intriguing Innes.

Lexie soon joins Innes in his work in bohemian Soho, where he edits an up-and-coming art magazine. Lexie’s natural vivacity and pert opinions make her a promising art critic, while her burgeoning love for Innes grows into a committed relationship, despite his estranged wife and frightening daughter. Lexie’s chapters, which interchange with those of Elina and Ted, are full of passion and an intangible gusto for life, which is somewhat dampened by the fact (made known early on) that she will die young. Still, Lexie’s adventurous zeal prevails, making her the undeniable star of the show, despite the bittersweet knowledge that she must die before the story ends.

Meanwhile, in contemporary London, Elina struggles with the aftereffects of the traumatic, botched delivery of her newborn son. A Norwegian painter, Elina wakes without any memory of the birth, which lasted several days and nearly killed her. Her apparent amnesia surrounding the event terrifies her pragmatic boyfriend, Ted, a film editor, prone to memory blackouts himself. As the days crawl by, Elina reacquaints herself with the day-to-day proceedings of her life, gradually beginning to remember the delivery, regaining strength and familiarizing herself with her new role as a mother.

Ted, however, is plagued by a sudden onset of alien memories which he cannot place. These memories, most of them triggered by interactions with his son, make little sense in the context of his life. Together, Ted and Elina begin to piece together the fragments of Ted’s early childhood, which, it becomes clear, is hardly what it has always seemed. Their search causes their current story to collide with the past, and, of course, with the long-dead Lexie, in an explosive “Aha” moment which leaves everyone reeling.

O’Farrell’s writing nears poetry, challenging the reader from the moment of Lexie’s first entrance. However, once accustomed to the style and pace of the prose, readers will find the story hard to put down. “The Hand That First Held Mine” is a very satisfying read, which, happily, never compromises artistry for story, because it simply does not need to.