Floating Hotel

You think Floating Hotel is going to start out as an adventure story because you watch a 12-year-old boy finagle his way onboard a spaceship, the Grand Abeona. It’s a hotel for those jaunting about from one planetary playground of the wealthy to the next. The boy is a stowaway who is then taken in by the crew. Then you meet the concierge, who is receiving love sonnets periodically at her desk, sent through the pneumatic tubes. So then you sigh happily and settle in for what you see may also be a good love story. That’s fine, but then there’s the subversive pamphleteer known as the Lamplighter whose brief essays note that things may be a bit rotten in Denmark (or Andromeda, as the case may be).

Floating Hotel is a carefully crafted show more and entertaining perspective on where we as a society appear to be at the present moment, speculative fiction about real-life existence from the view of working class service providers. Spaceship or not, there's not a lot of glamour in most of these jobs. The work is hard – being on one’s feet all day, competently delivering charm, comfort, and ease to strangers. Some of the guests are lovely people; others are nasty, privileged sorts who ought to be shoved out the nearest air lock. But well-trained staff (even those untrained) don’t do that on the Grand Abeona. The hotel sails smoothly and serenely through the galaxy.

The thing is that author Grace Curtis manages to engage you in the fun of espionage, dead bodies and cryptic messages while all of this is going on. There's humor to be found. One quote;
”I must apologize for stealing your order this morning.,,,I hope you didn’t get into any trouble.” To which the most honest response from the waitress must be, “Well, I got st–stabbed with a fork.”

The book starts slow in terms of action in order to allow the reader to get a handle on who is who, but roughly midway, the character story lines begin to intersect in very interesting ways. Who is trustworthy? Who is not? This is important because, roughly midway in, the head of housekeeping has found blood in the bathtub. That kind of thing tends to cause concern among the guests. Are the Emperor's agents aboard ship? That too is disconcerting to some of the guests.

To answer the usual question of to whom would one recommend this? To the person who needs an encouraging and entertaining book, but not one with an overly simplistic plot. To someone who is looking for a bit of fun and a bit of humor, but who recognizes that an author still has to build in narrative tension. To the reader who need not be hit over the head with a message, but who can find and take in the meaning between the lines. show less

I think this book could be best described as a cozy SciFi with a bit of mystery sprinkled in. The blurb intrigued me and it definitely lived up to it (mysterious love poems - sonnets to be precise- and all). It takes place on the Grand Abeona - an intergalactic hotel. While we do see snippets of the guests, the story focuses on the experiences of the staff, some of whom snuck aboard as stowaways (in one case to retrieve a countess's forgotten muff) and find friendship like they have never known before. I also loved the little drawings at the start of each chapter!

I loved reading about the hotel. It seems so fantastical (and of course reserved for the richest of the rich). The elegance of beauty of the hotel reminds me a bit of The show more Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern), but it is light and elegant where the circus is more dark and gritty. The style and events are very different too. I would love to see the Galactic Diorama (think an artistic ever-changing map of the solar system that shows the position of the ship). It sounds like such a marvelous sight to behold. And despite all the glory and beauty that the guests experience, there is still a very real and functional ship behind the scenes (something I appreciated the author mentioning). I also enjoyed all the random little tidbits the author threw in about space travel that one would not necessarily consider (e.g. the lack of signal for most of the journey and the fact that people can't just leave because oops, they aren't close to anything). I feel like a lot of it might be based on how cruises function and has been expanded to a space setting. I definitely enjoyed the thought put into the hotel, its functioning and its surroundings. Given that space tourism is already (somewhat) a thing, I could definitely see the rich deciding t holiday in space in the future (even if not in quite this much of a tour like manner).

I loved the characters and their interactions. But that being said, there were a lot of them and it took me a while to be able to keep track of everyone. A character list would have been super helpful. There were a couple of points where I found myself wondering who a character was when we started following them, but I usually remembered within a couple of paragraphs. A list would still have been helpful though (especially should someone put down the book for a few days). All the characters were clearly well thought out and had distinct personalities. I enjoyed how close they all were and their movies nights. Working in such isolated conditions is definitely incredible for team comradery and the author captured this beautifully. I loved Unwade and how she likes that her physical prominence means that she is largely unnoticed by the guests and can go about solving mysteries undisturbed. Oh, and of course I love Garbage, because who doesn't love a pet rat?

If a found family story set in a space hotel sounds like your kind of book, I definitely suggest that you pick this one up. The writing is beautiful and the characters are lovely (even if they have to deal with not so lovely circumstances with the guests sometimes). This is definitely a ship I'd love to visit again, be it in real life or between the pages of a book.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. As always, all opinions are my own. show less

The Grand Abeona Hotel travels among the stars, picking up the richest of the rich as it goes along. Many of its crew and management are desperate stowaways who have made the hotel their family. But there are dark undercurrents. Someone seems to have disposed of a body in a bathtub. There may be a spy on board. Is one of the passengers a notorious rebel journalist known as the Lamplighter?
Despite some gore, it has the cozy vibe of The Sol Majestic by Ferrett Steinmetz.
Sol Majestic has a more lyrical style and a tighter story arc. I also wish Abeona’s technology had been given more attention.

A book with its heart in the right place and good intentions. Ultimately, it tries to do too much, but I still ended up enjoying it.

There is Abeona, a hotel-shaped oasis in an evil (of course it’s evil) Galactic Empire.

“Not for Abeona were the sharply curled edges of a gilt pedestal, the bone-bruising hardness of a veined marble floor, sallow gold and lace trim. … It looked like something somebody loved.”

Here are the guests and the employees with their backstories, and here are those who would rebel against the Empire. It starts off cozy. Come and follow Carl the manager (who is too nice to have this job, if you ask me); Uwade at the reception (good backstory); Dunk the sous-chef (“People sometimes asked Dunk what he’d be show more of he wasn’t a chef. … “Easy,” he’d say. “I’d be dead.”); Acad the grumpy linguistics professor; Ooly the math genius with bad social skills (such a cliché, but the author makes it work) etc etc etc. There is some Shakespeare and other poetry that made me smile in happy recognition. There are movie nights. The plot veers off into darker territory quite fast, though. Increased reading speed detected!

My problem was too many POV’s, all the characters hardly had space to breathe, so some were more well-written than others. I wasn’t impressed with the undercover agents’ chapters, for example. There were too many stories in one book, too many themes. We spent too little time on the big reveal and I had to suspend disbelief a couple of times. But there were brilliant scenes, passages, conversations, and a life-affirming ending.

3.7 encouraging stars, rounded up.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-book! show less

In Floating Hotel we discover the Grand Aboena Hotel, an enormous spaceship appointed as a luxury hotel. We meet a diverse cast of characters, dipping in and out of their lives in a series of vignettes. And we discover a mystery at the heart of the hotel that could affect everyone on board.

This is cozy scifi, heavily character driven although there is a plot that threads amongst each vignette, connecting everything together. The vignettes are short but compelling, and this entire book felt like a scifi slice-of-life. I’ll be honest, I’ve never read anything in this genre quite like this. The writing was wonderful, and each character’s voice was distinctive and unique.

The only drawback for me was that I wanted more. The world show more building is good; through the different stories we get an idea of the greater world and galaxy, the empire they all exist in, and the culture and politics at play. But it’s only a little taste, and we never delve very deeply, into the world or the character’s lives. I would have loved to see more stories or a longer novel that explored the empire, the coded message, the world at large.

However, that’s just my own preference for plot driven stories. This book is beautifully written and executed and absolutely succeeds at what it set out to do, and I think for anyone who likes cozy, character driven stories, this will be at least a 4 star read. I’m interested to see what this author does next.

Thank you DAW books for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review! show less

A weird book, but not an unpleasant one — I loved the soaring imagination of the hotel, the kindness of the staff and the found family of it all. It had a surprisingly continuous plotline despite hopping points of view, and I did love the integrity of the solutions offered. The big badness of the empire was both too over the top and all too believeable.

All the same, because we kept skipping points of view it was hard to get invested.

Advanced Readers Copy provided by edelweiss.

This is an odd book. First of all, the cover: it's a lovely cover, and fits well with the description of the Hotel Abeona at the very start of the book. The prose is also very lyrical in many places, and that fits the cover. But the plot... doesn't. The plot is a slice-of-life story, and while a slice-of-life in a spaceship hotel sounds like it should be fascinating, there was so much of the story (either present-day or flashbacks) that took place on land that after the first few chapters I had no sense of place or continuity. I lost interest multiple times in the first half of the book, and more than once I considered DNFing the book. I didn't, but I did liberally skim the second half.

What I liked:

• I enjoy slow-paced, character-driven,

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• slice-of-life stories.


• I enjoyed the hotel setting.


• Some of the characters (mostly Carl and Daphne) were enjoyable to read about.

What I disliked:

• The mystery part of the plot revolved around a mystery that gets very loosely resolved on the 4th page from the end. I wanted more denouement.


• Each chapter (except the final one) had a new main character, but I barely got a sense of personality from any of them. I definitely didn't get enough to connect with them.


• There was no need to throw in a torture scene in the middle of the book. That didn't fit the tone leading up to that point, and resulted in me distrusting the book.

I had very high hopes for this one, but I didn't get what I was expecting. I thought the hotel would play a larger part of the book and be more relevant to the story instead of being important for the first chapter and then turning into a background. If you go into this book expecting something closer to what it is than I did—less whimsical, more thriller, and definitely not cozy—then you might enjoy it more. show less