Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

This is a clean love story about a young Chinese boy living through WWII. There’s a lot of jazz music in it, and plenty of accurate, heart-wrenching history. The family of the main character has difficulty communicating and this is passed on to the next generation, and only semi-resolved by the end. But those kinds of things take time. I didn’t feel the author was a particularly fine writer or that he kept all his facts straight all the time, but his pacing was good and I loved that new, important facts about the main character’s history popped up throughout the novel. I enjoyed the nonlinear narrative.