The Reader's Loft recognizes the importance of book groups as a way of creating community around the written word in these modern and often too-busy times.
We've created our book group registry to offer you and your book group the greatest support we can.
When you register your book group at The Reader's Loft, you receive:
15% OFF Book Group Purchases for Each Member, Online Listing of Your Group's Title Selections, Free Reading Group Guides and any other discussion materials you need, guaranteed availability and connection with other reading groups in the area, for great book suggestions. Click here to download our Book Group Registration Form.
Must Be Tuesday Group |
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet By Jamie Ford
Not Open To Public Saturday, May 15 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 scholar-shipping 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. 
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