Floating Hotel
Grace Curtis
You know those science fiction novels in which there are four point-of-view characters, and each character gets point of view for a chapter, then we move on to the next? (I think Gibson's Cyberspace trilogy was the first time I really noticed it.) You know how you never know quite what's going on, and it's all very confusing? Well, in Floating Hotel Grace Curtis takes it to the max, and SOMEHOW, she makes it work!
Floating Hotel takes place on the Abeona, a hotel that is also a spaceship, so it floats through space. Don't expect a lot of technobabble -- the Abeona is determinedly retro-chic. For instance, the Abeona's messaging system is paper messages sent through pneumatic tubes. There are of course a whole bunch of people on the Abeona -- staff and guests.
Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of these characters, a different one each time. There is just one character who gets two chapters, and by the time that happens, you will be expecting it. This is much less confusing than it sounds. Each character mentions some of the other characters, just a few in the earliest chapters. Thus when one of those characters gets a chapter of their own, you're ready for it. I never found the story hard to follow.
It must be admitted, at the beginning I was not quite sure if there WAS a story. Because this story-telling approach is a slow way to introduce characters and setting, the first half is fairly slow. However, I came to see that a story had gradually crept up on me -- a mystery, in fact. And it was fun.
I would probably rate this a mere three stars were it not for the novel story-telling technique. I'm a Neophile, so I'm always intrigued to see something in a book that I haven't seen before. If you prefer the tried-and-true, you may not like Floating Hotel as much as I did.
Thanks to NetGalley and DAW for an advance reader copy of Floating Hotel. This review expresses my honest opinions.
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