Floating Hotel

[cornerofmadness]

Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It was a 3.5 read for me but I didn't round up for one reason. I know I would never have made it past the first 50 pages if I hadn't been reading this for a very narrow focused reading challenge prompt. Even though its SF it read more like a contemporary novel focused on the mundane parts of people lives which has never interested me. It's a rather static novel without much happening until you sit back and realize what Curtis is doing which I wouldn't have done if I had just picked this up from the library randomly because I would have set it back as a 'not for me' (versus being poorly written and I DNFed it)

Each character in the book gets their own chapter (Carl, the manager gets a few) and it takes a while but you realize that you, the reader, have more information than the characters do. Each chapter is designed to follow what is happening in the moment and also what hard luck story brought this character to work at the titular hotel, which is a great idea for a hotel. It goes into 'deep space' fast forwarding itself around the galaxy like a luxury cruise ship. Only this hotel is showing her age. Anyhow, as we gather this information we can see Curtis is putting this together like a giant jigsaw and we can see it coming when the characters, lacking the information, cannot.

Each chapter is prefaced with the lamplighter bulletin, a rebel against the 500 year rule of The Emperor (who the lamplighter says isn't actually 500+ years but are successive clones of the original) and make no mistakes this is a fascist state. You can't even imagine other alien races, even as a child without censor so one of the subplots is the bellboy showing bootleg old SF movies to the staff. There are bits of poetry shooting through the hotel's communication system which I can't help but imagine as anything other than the old pneumatic tube type situation. We have academics on board trying to solve a puzzle. We have spies for the emperor trying to capture the lamplighter who they believe is on the staff of the hotel.

So when the book said it was a mystery I was thinking more of a whodunnit than these little mysteries. There isn't much action in this book, but once I recognized the pattern in the writing, I was more engaged. Like I said, it's not at all badly written. It's just my interests don't align with the little details of people's lives.



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