#Floating Hotel

[nzbookwyrm]

March 2024

[upstairsdownstairsandinbetween]

"Guntu,"Seto Inland Sea, Japan,

Designed by Yasube Horibe

[hiddenbookcasepodcast]

Sapphics in Space Summer at The Hidden Bookcase continues 💕✨ This episode, we’re covering Grace Curtis’ gorgeous debut, Frontier 🤠🚀🌎

🌎 Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts

🌎 For transcripts, visit our website

🌎 For closed captions, visit our YouTube

[jruthphipps]

This week's bookmail was Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis.

[marvelat-words]

Book Review: Floating Hotel

All the characters are great, in that I loved learning about them, but did not love everything about them. They were flawed, and that made them so real. Every member of staff ended up stuck there by accident and chose to stay on purpose. Their love for the hotel and each other was beautiful and, like each of them, imperfect. I wanted to see more of characters who didn’t get their own chapters, too.

Full review.

[rmsqueenmaryonthisday]

Wishful Thinking

Headline from the New York Times on July 18, 1967: City Hopes to Buy Queen Mary For Use as a School in Brooklyn The city is preparing a bid of about $2-million in an effort to purchase the liner Queen Mary for use as a floating high school anchored at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard.

[sailluna]

Floating Hotel Virgin Islands - Sail LUNA

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You’ll love Sail LUNA’s outdoor spaces – with several spacious areas made for you to lounge, sunbathe, or just relax in total privacy, if that’s your desire.

[rosemariecawkwell]

My favourite Sci Fi and Fantasy 2024

[subterranean-heartsick-blues]

Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis book review

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You're gonna fly away / Glad you're goin' my way (Cruisin’ – Smokey Robinson).

Hi there, long time no see! Or at least if feels that way because I’m realizing that I've probably forgotten how to read due to the fact that my weekend has been entirely consumed by Dragon Age: The Veilguard (#ad #sponsored)! It’s wild because the game is currently being “review bombed” (meaning randos leaving purposefully bad reviews so the average rating goes real low to the floor) because the angriest dudes on the planet think the game is too “woke.” There’s a non-binary character in the game, and now apparently the weirdest guy you know feels the need to spend all of his time going on YouTube and yelling at people for playing the game? Man, that’s sad. It’s also sad because I can see how this poisoned mindset is starting to affect the opinions of the people who were looking forward to the game! They’ll be saying shit like “Yeah sure, the game might be too woke, but if you can ignore that, then it’s actually, maybe, kind of, sort of… fun!” as if that weren't the most pathetically flaccid way of saying, “I think I like it, but I need other people to tell me what to think, so I don’t know yet!” So~oo brave! Anyway, what’s my point? I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to talk about Dragon Age: The Veilguard because I like it and it’s fun (#ad #sponsored), but also, it’s important to note that I’m enjoying the game because it’s woke, not despite it. Got to "stay woke," like the song said. Yeah well, I figured I’d take a break from being exposed to all of these manufactured “culture wars” and get back into my favorite pastime of reading! And the best thing about reading is that it’s solitary. Aaah peace and quiet, so nice! Taking a break from playing my woke fantasy to read a woke Sci-fi. Okay, I’ll stop saying “woke” now, because it doesn’t even sound like a real word anymore. What I’m getting at is that it’s interesting how different the landscapes are for different forms of expressions, as in the gaming world, people can’t even handle when there are gay people or people of color in their precious video game, while in literature, the sheer diversity of the story and the characters that inhabit the Floating Hotel, this book, are not only a few of its greatest strengths, but also its biggest selling points. But here’s the thing, I’m a huge fan of Science Fiction… as long as it’s not in book form. I love the Alien movies (yes, even Alien: Covenant), Mass Effect, Metroid, Futurama, hell, I even liked Starfield! But whenever I get a craving for a Sci-Fi book, my mind immediately imagines something like an Enders Game and any interest I might have had shrivels up like a pumpkin on November 3rd. I don’t know why, I really don’t. Unfortunately, for the most part, I think this book was mostly the same in that area. You know how when you’re showing your friend your favorite movie and they’re kind of disinterested and they keep missing all the big plot revelations because they keep glancing at their phones? Well, I was that friend for a good chunk of this book. I’m the problem! But hey, I didn’t give up on it, that’s got to count for something, right?

Nonetheless, let me see if I can talk myself into liking this book. My main problem here was the fact that because we switch up the POV characters every chapter, it was kind of hard for me to grasp what was going on a lot of the time. It’s like Let it Snow all over again! The first story being good, the John Green one being mid, and then the third story being a blight on literature as a whole! Too varying for my tastes. Like, there were certain story-lines in Floating Hotel that I wanted to learn more about (like the alien one), only for the chapter to end and we’d move on to the boring spy story. Ugh. But at least this book had one author, so the writing stayed consistently fantastic throughout. Besides, here’s the thing, I wanted to like Floating Hotel, and sometimes when you pretend to like something for long enough, you actually end up liking it for real. And eventually that’s what happened here. Yay! Belated synopsis time? Okay. The basic story is that we follow the titular floating hotel, the Grand Abeona; a remnant of past human explorative optimism that now serves more as an allegory of one of those shitty cruise tickets you’d win while gambling. But what makes this specific hotel special isn’t that it can travel to infinity and beyond, but because of the interesting people that always seem to inhabit the hotel at any given time. From what I can understand, the story is sometimes about a jewel heist, a spy mission, a hidden resistance group fighting against an oppressive empire, and an “ice-breaker” work activity accidentally uncovering aliens trying to communicate with us. If this whole thing sounds like I’m literally piecing it together right now, it’s because I am. Ha ha! Damn, I can’t spark-notes this one. Can somebody go out and read this book real quick and make a clickbait YouTube video explaining beat-by-beat exactly what was going on and maybe a rundown of the themes? Thanks in advance! Anyway, sorry for ranting about video games for… oh my… this entire review, but I do think there’s an interesting comparison to be made between grifters who make their living spreading misery and organizing hate mobs against any work of art with even a dash of queerness and how Floating Hotel depicts its universe. In the story, society has progressed to the point where people can literally travel among the stars as a luxury, and yet nothing has really changed all that much. I mean, everything is still so fucked. Underneath all the quirkiness, there's something broken here. It’s really sad. And yet, I think there’s something deeply moving and deeply melancholic how this book portrays a found family of outcasts, queer or otherwise, who decided to create their own home carved out of the stars. Sounds familiar, huh? It did to me. I guess in some ways, we all need to find our own floating hotel somewhere out there. …Hey, it worked! I like this book now!!

“An Empire is a tricky thing to dismantle.”

[jonathanpongratz]

New Book Release: Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis

    Blurb: This cozy debut science fiction novel tells a story of misfits, rebels, found family—and a mystery that spans the stars Welcome to the Grand Abeona home of the finest food, the sweetest service, and the very best views the galaxy has to offer. All year round it moves from planet to planet, system to system, pampering guests across the furthest reaches of the milky way. The last word…

[allbookedupblogstuff]

Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis

Source: NetGalley – Thank you so much to the publisher!TL;DR: A surprisingly warm and cozy story that follows a crew and the occupants of a floating hotel – including spies and torturers. I loved this. Plot:The plot is told through the multiple perspectives of the crew and occupants of the ship – I love that setup but it may not work for others. Spies and espionage lay at the centerCharacters:…

[libertyreads]

Book Review #11 of 2024--

Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis. Rating: 3 stars.

Read from February 12th to 17th.

Before I get into the review, a quick thank you to both NetGalley and the publishers over at DAW for allowing me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review. Floating Hotel follows a misfit group of employees aboard a hotel that moves throughout the galaxy to offer up its clientele the greatest views, foods, and luxury that it has to offer. But something is wrong about the Abeona. There's a secret lurking in the walls that may lead to the hotel's ultimate downfall. This cozy Sci-Fi/Mystery comes out on March 19th and is available for preorder now.

I'm starting to think that maybe any genre labelled 'cozy' just isn't for me. I love Sci-Fi and I love a misfit group, a found family, a bunch of hooligans. But the thing with a cozy is that it attempts to keep the stakes lower so you can enjoy the atmosphere and the people. And the whole time I'm reading it, it's like the plot is happening on the periphery and I just want to focus on that. Like I can see the plot happening out of the corner of my eye and I want nothing more than to whip my head around and focus on it but I can't because I do not control the narrative. If we had a bit more focus throughout the novel, I probably would have enjoyed it much more. I will say that the things that were on the periphery do move into the forefront...around the last 20 pages or so?

I really enjoyed the setting. I LOVED getting everyone's backstories. I just don't know that this is the one for me. In each chapter we followed a different character which meant that there was no true main character here. We could argue that it's Carl because he gets two chapters, but that's also kind of not true. I think the real main character is the Abeona. And it was fun the whole way. I also loved the way that this brought up a lot of issues facing the world today but presented in a way that is more easily digested. There is also a paragraph in the novel (around the 66% mark) that feels like the author had it strike them like a bolt of lightning. It is just so good. It actually makes me think of Parker from Leverage. (This is good. Very Good.) I wish that the rest of the novel was like this paragraph. The tone, the imagery, the style. So good.

Overall, it was a good novel. There were certain things I was wanting that I didn't get from it, but it was still a fun time and I loved being back in a spaceship again.

[beckysbook5]

First Lines Friday!

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page. Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to…

[rod00dles]

“Love doesn’t discriminate between the Sinners and the Saints. It takes and it takes and it takes.”

[awehbra]

[rmsqueenmaryonthisday]

The Final Bid

From the Spokane Daily Chronicle, Spokane, Washington, on July 25, 1967: Interest High in Queen Mary London (AP) – Sixteen firm cash bids for the 81,237-ton liner Queen Mary will be considered Wednesday at a board meeting of the Cunard Steamship line in London.   The deadline for bids expired at midnight Monday. The final one, four hours before deadline, was from Long Beach, Calif., to use the…