Seattle-set novel broken down at EdCC lecture

It’s a fusion of history and fiction, past and present, love and friendship.

For many readers, Jamie Ford’s Seattle-based, best-selling novel is a literary delight.

“Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,” published in 2009, is this year’s Edmonds Community College Community Read.

EdCC is offering a free brown-bag lecture about the book at 12:30 p.m. Feb. 27. at the college’s Black Box Theatre.

The book begins in 1986 outside the Panama Hotel in Seattle where the belongings of Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II have been discovered.

It tells the story of a first-generation Chinese-American boy and a Japanese-American girl who forge an unlikely friendship amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews and FBI raids of the 1940s.

This is the sixth year of the EdCC Community Read. Previous books include: “The Big Burn” by Timothy Egan; “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer; “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World” by Dan Koeppel; “Middle Passage” by Charles Johnson; and “Zaatar Days, Henna Nights, Adventures, Dreams and Destinations Across the Middle East” by Maliha Masood.

The Black Box Theatre is at 20000 68th Ave. W., Lynnwood. For more information check the website, www.blackboxedcc.org.