
Hotel World
Author: Ali Smith
Five women’s lives become interconnected in a hotel somewhere in England. One of the women just happens to be a ghost of a women who died in the hotel’s dumb waiter. It is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that takes some getting used to, but if you can get past that, you can enjoy it since it is just like you would think if you wrote down your own thoughts.
The book is dumb and boring. It starts off great though. The first chapter is the ghost of the girl that just died in the dumb waiter. Her memory is fading along with her senses. She is forgetting what it is like to taste and smell as those go away. She is trying to remember who she is and how she died and why. It was very interesting and the book should have stuck with that.
Then the next chapter talks about a homeless girl that sits right outside the hotel everyday. It barely goes into who she is before the next chapter which is slightly more interesting about a girl that works at the front counter of the hotel. The stories start interconnecting there and I had more hope for the book.
The fourth chapter was okay and more of the characters start talking to each other. It was about a hotel guest but then it starts veering off somewhere not interesting.
The fifth chapter is the sister of the dead girl and the entire chapter is all one sentence. Page and pages of a big run-on with & symbols separating the thoughts…kinda. It is so hard to follow and when I was following it, it wasn’t interesting. I thought maybe the last chapter would bring it all together. I had already lost interest.
It was lame last chapter that didn’t talk about any of the characters anymore, but a bunch of stuff about people being connected to one another and blah blah blah.
I don’t recommend this book. It starts off great and then goes pbbbbbbbbt.