Grace Curtis

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.… (altro)

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 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!… (altro)

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.… (altro)