Thanks to DAW and NetGalley for an advanced copy of the e-book of this title in exchange for an honest and unbiased review!

Cozy science fiction is perhaps on of my favorite blending of tropes and genres in recent years. Floating Hotel is no exception. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different staff member or temporary resident, which took a few chapters to get used to; just as you get used to one person’s story, you’re yanked to another, never to really return again unless that character crosses paths with another one later on. But the characters are heartfelt and your heartstrings get more than their fair share of tugging at someone’s past or a realization they experience in the present.

“Cozy” has a bit of an implication of low stakes and non- or at least low-violence, and Floating Hotel deviates from that as well. There’s a particularly jarring series of events regarding maybe-secret-agents and the looming threat of a corrupt Empire that muddy the cozy waters here. It tends to make the story seem like it should encompass more, that it should continue on for a few more chapters or be the start of a sweeping sci-fi epic instead of a slice of life standalone.

But overall, I loved this story and the weaving of the character’s backstories. The pacing is a bit unbalanced, with things ramping up in the final chapters, and things wrap up a bit too quickly. I can’t help but wish this were a series instead, but isn’t that a good feeling to have - to just want more?

Thank you NetGalley and DAW Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

3.5!

Floating Hotel promises a cozy scifi perfect for fans of Becky Chambers, and I think it really delivers on this front.

The Grand Abeona Hotel is a hotel in space full of luxury with an eclectic mix of people on board. The story is told using multiple perspectives, with each character getting its own section. I think this was an interesting way to approach the novel, but it ultimately made it feel more like a collection of vignettes than a novel for me. This isn’t really that much of an issue, but I think I would have appreciated it more had I known that going in. There’s not a lot of build up because the book isn’t super long and it reads quickly. While I think Curtis did a good job with creating a cast full of diverse voices and perspectives (and I do think each character is good at garnering a different reaction out of the reader), I didn’t manage to sink into the novel, and I think that’s where it does differ from comps to Becky Chambers. Still, Curtis’ work is rich and I think she does manage to make each character impactful, so I’m hopeful that I’ll fall in love with this one whenever I decide it’s time to revisit it.

The Grand Abeona Hotel isn't your average hotel. This is a hotel on a spaceship traveling across the galaxy. At one point only the richest of the rich could board, though it isn't quite as exclusive as it once was and things especially below deck aren't as pristine, it is still a magical place of relaxation and discovery.

The Floating Hotel is made of interlocking stories focusing on different quirky, diverse crew members or passengers on the ship. This gives enjoyable insights into different aspects of the Abeona and the varied connections the staff has made within their found family in the stars. The hotel with its combination of travel and destinations reminds me in a lot of ways of being on a cruise ship.

There is a definite cozy vibe, but there is also suspense of an underlying story about a corrupt emperor and a secret journalist that may be traveling with the ship, and who is giving away the emperor's secrets. Plus with a master thief and trained spies on board not everything is a relaxing day at the spa. The ending took me a bit by surprise, but felt overall satisfying.

Fans of Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus and Tao Wong's The Nameless Restaurant should enjoy this story.

I couldn't get into this one, unfortunately. The writing was decent, the idea enticing, but I just couldn't do it.

Release: March 19

Delightful, delightful, delightful: engrossing from first page to last, this involving Science Fiction "locked-room" mystery serves up what is almost the equivalent of a generational ship, given the lengths many of the staff have lived and worked on "the Grand Abeona Hotel." Think of the luxury cruise ships [for the excessively wealthy] of the early 19th century: the luxe accommodations, wide-ranging exquisite cuisine, superb service; and of course, classism, with the staff in cramped quarters, often denigrated by elitist guests, welcoming their time alone or with other staff.
Now picture such a vessel in Deep Space, traversing a galaxy, planetary system to planetary system, collecting guests, shuttling them to visit planets, and later to home planets. But the Abeona Hotel never ceases, never calls any planet home. It continually travels, a wabderer in Space (albeit on prescribed routes).

This elite vessel is set against a background of totalitarian authority, a "500-year-old" Emperor who rules the galaxy with iron control, and denies the existence of extraterrestrial sentience. He is the epitome of intelligent life, therefore aliens cannot exist. His rule reminds me of the Ottoman Empire of the first millennium Earth.
Of course, there will be rebellions and subterfuge, and suddenly his henchpersons target the Grand Abeona Hotel as the location of the long-duration gnat in the Emperor's reign, a "pamphleteering" journalist exposing truths the Emperor could not want known.

FLOATING HOTEL inspires devoted reading and rereading, to carefully elicit all its layers.

The Floating Hotel was an interesting read that surprised me and kept me interested throughout. The story shifts from one perspective to another, giving different points of view and progressing the story and mystery along the way. The one issue with doing a story in that way is that I ended up wishing we’d stayed with certain characters longer, or got to see a bit more of them. I would say to read it more for the light sci fi than for the mystery. The mystery is there but this is far more a slice of life where a mystery happens to occur.

Note: arc provided by the publisher via netgalley in exchange for honest review

So Floating Hotel was a quiet, cozier sort of mystery, set in an interstellar space hotel. Cool, right? And it was all of those things! I liked the mystery, I adored the idea of the hotel itself, and I enjoyed the overall concept. Perhaps there were a few too many points of view for my liking, because it was harder to connect to the characters when we were constantly switching among them. That said, there were definitely some characters I enjoyed, so that was good!

There are, as the synopsis suggests, quite a few secrets to unfurl during the story, and mysteries to uncover. Still, it remains a quieter tale, even when the stakes are high. I wasn't exactly on the edge of my seat, but I didn't want to give up on it either. Obviously, the fact that this giant hotel is in space, in the middle of nowhere, ups the ante, so that certainly helped set the stage and the atmosphere, which was on point.

Bottom Line: Cozy and mysterious at once, this story featured a lot of characters and mysteries without being too dark, but appropriately atmospheric.

TL;DR: Lots to enjoy, lots to scratch my head over.

What there is to enjoy: The prose was really lovely and easy to sink into every time I opened the book. I enjoy the setting of a luxurious space liner and the warm, gentle descriptions of this place that saved so many people and gave them a home. The intrigue aboard and the found family vibes throughout kept me interested during a slump.

What was difficult: The POV changes every chapter to a new character. That means that as soon as you start to fall in love and get attached, you're introduced to someone new, and never get to go too deep with the characters that resonate with you. This format also makes the plot, such as it is, harder to follow, because we essentially start over with every chapter. Some of these style choices took away from my enjoyment, as did the reality that, as cozy as it was, romanticizing customer service (especially in the hospitality industry) is even harder to believe than a space cruise ship.

Retail reviews post on release date.

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 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!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher DAW for providing me with an arc in return for an honest review!

4.7 rounded up

This book is an absolute treasure! It brings about some of my favorite elements from some of my favorite stories "The Night Circus" and "Mass Effect" (citadel dlc specifically): a gaggle of misfits brought together in a setting that is just as much a character as they are, while mayhem happens in the background. The world/universe is queernormative which is a must for sci-fi in my personal opinion, as well as, a plethora of other minority indentities that are treated with respect.

In this case, the setting is a luxury cruiseship sailing across the galaxy which has seen better days, and as for the mayhem, well espionage certainly fits the bill. We bounce between various staff members and guests who each have their own unique pov—I never felt like any two were the same with differing names—and goal.

The interconnection of these stories is really where the book shines. Something that might seem like a throwaway line of dialog or description pops up later illuminating a new way of thinking about what's being presented. I never felt like a section existed just to bump up the page count or act as a mental reset of filler before the 'true plot' comes back. I wont lie and say that I loved all the pov uniformly, yet none were a slog to get through.

I appreciate any story that's willing to put in the effort to make the setting itself a character. This task can be difficult to pull off, yet I found this a very successful attempt! Kudos to the author for taking the time to make the reader feel as if they're wandering the halls and the longing to make it a true reality.

Additionally, I really enjoyed the nods to the horrors of the empire at large. While those on the 'Grand Abeona Hotel' are attempting to go about their lives however they can, others on the ground are struggling underfoot of a vicious imperial machine. These asides really cement the ship and the characters into the wider cosmos of the story. This isn't a spaceship story that ignores the wider world within which it floats around.

Those looking for an action-heavy sci-fi thriller won't really find that here. This is moreso a series of character studies set in space and a criticism of late-stage capitalism (the empire). If you enjoy exploring a new world and really getting to know the characters—think a really great rpg—then you'll have a blast!

The Floating Hotel has such a charming cast of characters that immediately draw you in. There's puzzle upon puzzle to solve with this one, and the setting is just *chef's kiss*. What a strong debut! Can't wait to see what the author does next.

In almost every forum I've seen it referred to, the blurb for Floating Hotel refers to The Grand Budapest Hotel. It's what drew me to reading it. And it is entirely accurate, from a purely vibes-based perspective. I don't know quite how, I don't know quite why, but while reading, I had the spiritual equivalent of that music that everyone used for a bit doing Wes Anderson skit tiktoks going round my soul on a neverending loop. It just had something of that plinky-plunky, moving-between-shots and dotting-about-but-nevertheless-coalescing-into-a-coherent-whole-by-the-end feeling that I associate with his films. It had atmosphere.

And this is the major strength I would say the whole book has - it does vibes and charm and that general creation of a consistent atmosphere really really well.

Which it needs to, because this is a book that dots between different characters and plotlines quite a lot and quite quickly, and so it really needs to have something consistent underlying the whole thing to keep you hooked. Imagine if a particularly whimsical episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances and Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series got together and had a strange, unholy yet kind of adorable spawn. That's what we're looking at here. It's the story of a... well a hotel... that's... uh... floating. Through space, specifically. Admittedly, I think hotel is a bit of a misnomer (though used throughout the book). It seems far more like a quaint, intergalactic cruise liner making stops at the various ports on its predetermined route, picking up passengers along the way, dropping some off, and being the backdrop for a number of... whatever the lower-key cousin of wacky hijinx are. Whimsical shenanigans, perhaps.

We follow the ship through this journey through the eyes and perspectives of various members of the crew, learning how they came to be on the ship, what their job is, what their current preoccupation is, their concerns, their interactions with other staff. For the major part of the story, the stakes are extremely low - who's been sending sonnets through the pneumatic message system? Will people like this month's shit film club where we watch a retro movie? Let's go try to get an ox flank from the planet, but oh no, it's out of stock! We cycle around through the staff, this way, steadily learning the ship and its rhythms and sense of self, while slowly beginning to see the edges of a deeper, darker plot lurking under the surface, that might be more important than just the day to day running of business, may even be more important than the financial wellbeing of the hotel. But we do so steadily, gently always, never pressuring events to move faster than the current perspective would focus on. There are just little hints peppered through the dish... until eventually you realise find the chilli pepper? Something like that.

As a concept, it's not totally unique (and I do think City of Last Chances is a crucial comp for the structure - if you struggle with how that is a story far more focussed on the city than the people within it, this may give you difficulties for very similar reasons), but it is still plenty unusual. By using so many perspectives, it forces a more oblique approach to the central plot, and gives the author a chance to really bed down a sense of a place, a group of people and their collective community together, focussing on that, on the physical details of the space, the little moments of daily interaction, rather than feeling the need to get a proper drive on towards action and resolution.

Having this space particularly helps in addressing, in a casual and off-hand way a thing I often find poorly handled in SFF - class. It's not a core focus by any means. Don't go in expecting full Marx or anything. But there is a much more competent undercurrent of class consciousness in this book than I tend to assume I'll see in books set in space, even when their characters occupy various points on spectra of wealth and privilege. This is a book that gets the concept of nouveau riche, that gets the shift that happens from what was once vogue into something that is less high-culture and more aspirational middle class, the genteel degeneration of luxury. And that's super interesting! It's a luxury space hotel that's been flying through the galaxy, hosting the wealthy for decades - of course its interaction with fashion, with class and with culture is going to change in that time! And I love that it gets addressed, however obliquely.

Likewise, that space, and that approach to character hopping introduces us to a lot of people, and works hard to make them memorable and distinctive immediately upon meeting. My particular favourite is a grumpy linguistics professor whose position teaching an elective, ungraded course has left her able to gently exploit her situation and do whatever the fuck she wants, more or less, who unfortunately is being pushed back into actually acting on her principles, however much it irks her. I loved her so much, the moment I met her. And there are plenty like her - they appear on the page feeling nearly fully formed, you spend a chapter or so with them, and you feel instantly acquainted. And then see them through someone else's eyes as you carry on hopping.

And in this, I think it actually has City of Last Chances beat, because it does feel rather more tethered to its people than that did - I struggled with CoLC because we had a perspective for a little while then seemingly abandoned it for something completely unconnected. The web of interactions and interlacings there took a long time to materialise (and was amazing once it arrived, don't get me wrong - it's an astonishingly good book), in a way that wasn't an issue here. It's a hotel with a small staff. Everyone is connected and interacting all the time, so it's very hard not to feel like those different perspectives all link up. They're literally talking to each other right now!

But... but. It's not perfect. While those characters are often instantly interesting and interestingly realised, they suffer somewhat in the long term. The structure does not lend itself well to providing character depth, and the lack of repeat perspectives only doubles down on that. You simply do not spend long enough with any one person to get as fully bedded into their headspace as you would in a one or two perspective story.

And then, because of that, because you're not so totally emotionally invested in their wants and needs, some of the emotional payoff come the end of the story suffers a little. It's a story of ups and downs, and the downs never quite hit me like they should have at the end, because I didn't get the time to fully connect with the stakes, and the people, enough to let them fully seep in. Don't get me wrong, there are some moments of great catharsis or excitment or sadness, but the successful ones are all in the short term story scope, told in the confines of one perspective and chapter, rather than the overarching plot that has been gradually built across the perspectives. Which is a real shame precisely because you have those single moments done well to compare it to. It just doesn't quite land that final punch, and that left me somewhat unsatisfied on closing the final (digital) page.

It also, unfortunately, does not always manage the plot reveal itself super well. As I say, there are hints peppered throughout, and gentle foreshadowing galore, but for myself, I found that I had predicted some of those shadows rather, well... fore. And not the "one chapter early" that is the perfect delight of a mystery novel - exactly the zone where you get to feel smug, but before the intelligence of the detective starts being called into question. Once you start spending pages and pages sitting on a certainty that you know what's coming, it starts to grate a little bit that the author hasn't trusted that you'll have figured it out yet.

And I get that that's hard - I cannot imagine how tricky it is to try to manage that pacing knowing your audience is going to be a full range of people from called-it-on-the-first-page to never-saw-it-coming-even-at-the-last - I do. But personally, I would always rather be surprised than patronised, and this definitely felt like it leaned a little bit too far the wrong way in that equation. Not aggressively, not didactically. I never felt like Curtis was spelling it out and elbowing me in the ribs in case I'd missed it. But we were just given that bit too long with a few too many clues and well... it seemed obvious, when we got to things actually being admitted and uncovered.

Which is something of a contrast to some of the wider world-building, once we stepped outside the confines of the ship and started connecting up with what the wider galaxy looks like. Much of this is done, in the early parts of the book, through little snippets of pre-chapter text, which I am personally inclined against, but which were actually done particularly well here. They always felt relevant, they were never too long, and they worked tonally for what they were trying to be. That part of the world-building? Grand. But when we get to the later stages of the story, and the outside world starts to encroach into the insularity and safety of the hotel, and subtext has to stop subbing... slightly less well-managed at that point. There are some questions that I feel never got answered, in a way that isn't "lingering mysterious what if" so much as "we only have so many pages to do this in, let's go go go" and that's... well that's always disappointing. Especially in a book that really didn't overstay its welcome in terms of length and totally could have handled a couple more chapters to make sure everything got tidied away nicely (emotionally, at least).

It's not that I wanted no ambiguity, I want to stress. There's some ambiguity, or some... unfinishedness to some of the storylines at the end that feels entirely deliberate and is entirely good. Where we leave the characters, where we leave the emotional journey of the hotel? Yes, that ambiguity absolutely brings home how those plotlines did and should go. But it's more... there are parts of the story that are set up with the expectation of answers. They get answers. But some of those answers feel rushed, incomplete or emotionally immatured, in a way that we could totally have avoided with just that little bit of extra character work with a few people near the end.

The story is, very deliberately, set at a remove from the rest of the world. The hotel is itself a little world. That's the whole point. But when external events are allowed to intrude, I do unfortunately think a little bit of resolution to some of the questions is in order.

But, for all those gripes, I do still think this is a good book. It's not a perfect book, sure. But it is intensely charming, consistently atmospheric, and the vibes are impeccable. Does it have a plot? Not always. Eventually. Sort of. Does that actually matter? Actually... no. Not really.

As someone for whom A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet did not work, Floating Hotel delivers the experience that so many people have told me they had with the Wayfarers books - a bunch of people thrown together in a space ship, sharing their lives, seen through their distinct perspectives and having low-ish stakes, slightly delightful escapades, with some more serious bits of emotional work and the odd drama thrown in for some texture. For me, Floating Hotel does a better job at connecting those disparate threads of story, and creating that sense of community and cohesion than Chambers' work did, as well as delivering more impactfully (at least in the short term) on character work. It has some rough edges I would have loved it to have sanded down, but at its heart, it was deeply enjoyable and I'm incredibly glad I read it.

I also respect it for doing something that little bit different (not totally maverick, but just that little bit of "ooh, what are you doing here???") from the norm, and that always gets a rating bump from me.

Taking that into account, as well as all those rough edges, puts it into the trickiest bracket of scoring in my opinion - the seven out of ten. It's a 4/5 if you're doing star ratings. To an external viewer, that looks like an uncomplicatedly good rating, right? But 7 isn't uncomplicated. 7 is good... but. It's the last point of overall positivity before we start heading into "very mixed" or "meh" territory in your 6 and belows. 7 is messy.

7 is the best place for a book to be for a review, because it's where all the best discussion is. It's good. You're not angry at it or upset. It wasn't a wasted reading experience. But you have a lot of things to talk about, a lot of things to wonder if they could have been done that little bit differently, or what if they just...? What if it had only...? 10/10 can sometimes be dull, because you run out of ways to say "lads, this was good 'un". 7/10, existing as it does at the intersection of good and middling has all the scope for discussion, while retaining the sympathy and enthusiasm, to make for a thought provoking reviewing experience. So on a very meta-level, I rate this book's 7/10 a 10/10.

Dialling the nonsense back again slightly, I did enjoy it as a reading experience. I would absolutely recommend it, especially if you're someone who likes their books very vibes-forward. Come for that, come for the delightful cast, come for gentle pacing and delicious place descriptions. Yes, there are some issues, and they might niggle you, but if you like that tone, that atmosphere? Then they'll be a worthwhile price to pay for a really lovely reading experience. And, critically, it's a book that's trying to do A Thing. I would always prefer books that shoot for the moon and land among the stars over the ones that never tried at all. Especially when you're in a fancy Wes Anderson space hotel, so the cold vacuum of space is less of a concern.

A cozy space story of a hotel that wanders through the stars with a large cast of employees and guests that tries to take us on a wild ride but comes up a bit lackluster.

I’d like to preface there is quite literally nothing that is actually wrong with this book. The writing is solid and you can tell this isn’t the authours first rodeo.

My biggest issue was how hollow it felt. I wish there was a bit more of everything. More scifi, more rebellion, more character depth with less telling. Nothing was actually done poorly but it wasn’t done to the level I desired. It felt like a slice of life that just so happens to be in a space hotel with a pinch of Star Wars rebellion.

The cast was large but it felt too much to me. i wanted a little more focus. A character would be introduced and you’d delve into them. Their current life at the hotel and then a past snippet of years ago. But by the time you get to another chapter that character gets lost for a while until we center back chapters later and by that time I was invested in someone else or was forgetting that original character I liked forever ago.

I think this would be a brilliant introduction to science fiction or fantasy newbies that want something that feels very familiar while still having a scifi setting. I’m not anti this book by any means but I think even the title got me a bit more hyped than what I got while when reading.

Maybe I’ve been reading too many debuts lately but the writing in this, on a purely sentence level, was so pleasant it felt like a relief. Easy to read, with each POV quickly painting a distinct personality and backstory, and the overall threads expertly woven together. What an absolute delight.

Floating Hotel starts off as a series of character studies, almost like an interconnected short story collection. Each chapter tells you enough about a character to get a real sense of who they are, where they come from, and why they are on the Abeona, a floating hotel crisscrossing the galaxy. The pacing is both fast and slow—within each chapter, you quickly move through the most important elements of that character, but within the overall story, the common threads don’t start to take shape until well into the book. I have a high tolerance for a general sense of confusion in my sci-fi so this didn’t bother me at all but I could see others struggling with it. The worldbuilding isn’t particularly complex—humans in space, capitalism run amok, and a generally evil empire, the details of which are sometimes provided but generally immaterial.

In that sense, it reads more like a mystery than your typical science fiction—think Knives Out meets The Royal Budapest Hotel. And yet, the central mystery—who is the lamplighter?—is both solved and also not particularly important. The heart of the book is in the characters and how they interact with each other. I do think fans of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series will enjoy this, and I could also see some Murderbot fans converting as well. Cozy in the sense of the vibe and the general meandering of the plot, not in the sense of having no stakes or no violence (though the violence is minimal and this isn’t a particularly dark book). The ending wraps up nicely to be a standalone, though there is certainly plenty of room left to make this a series.

While I enjoyed the characters and the setting, I feel like the plot meandered in some places. There were also some details that appeared late in the story that could have been threaded through more to let us be more familiar and comfortable with the setting (I.e. an aging cruise ship past her prime, threadbare etc)

Reading "Floating Hotel" was an intriguing experience for me, despite knowing early on that it wasn't my favorite. While I didn't connect deeply with the structure or characters, I appreciated its uniqueness and the cozy sci-fi vibe reminiscent of "The Grand Budapest Hotel" in space. The story unfolds aboard a luxurious space hotel, blending elements of hospitality with an underlying mystery that kept me engaged, even if I felt a bit disconnected from the characters due to the fragmented storytelling.

The hotel itself becomes a character, portrayed as both a holiday destination and a home, evoking a mix of fascination and fear at the idea of floating through space. Overall, while "Floating Hotel" may not have been my cup of tea, its charm and cleverness make it a worthwhile read for fans of the found family trope and cozy mysteries.

Cozy science fiction is a genre that I didn't know I needed, but now I need more of. "Floating Hotel" was so fun and filled with intriguing characters and marvelous settings.

I've said before that I love creative storytelling methods. I loved how this book was told through a series of vignettes of different characters while at the same time still feeling like a cohesive narrative rather than a collection of short stories. I loved learning about each of the characters' relationships with the hotel and how they came to work there. I feel in love with almost every character, and even characters that were more "villain" figures I at least felt some sympathy for by the end of their chapter.

As someone who reads a lot of action packed, fast past sci-fi and fantasy adventure books, an element of "Floating Hotel" that I'm not used to is the characters living in an unjust empire but not going on some quest to overthrow it. Resistance is definitely a huge theme of the book. However, the book was more about how the characters cope with the world around them, rather than changing the world order. I really liked this perspective. Even in more regime upheaval focused books, there are always going to be people who just need to live with the consequences of what's happening around them.

My one wish for the book was that I wished I could have stayed with the characters for longer and see what happened with them after the conclusion of the story, but I don't think this is a critique.

4 stars.

Thank you NetGalley and DAW for the eARC. All opinions are my own.

Told in a variety of povs, Floating Hotel is about the people who have made their way from across the universe to live and work at the Abeona Hotel. More than a giant, charming, if slowly decaying, spaceship hotel, the Abeona is a home and refuge for its inhabitants but it seems like something is about to threaten that safety.

This took me awhile to get into. While the writing is engaging, each section is a new start as we get each character’s backstory, which made for a slow, winding read. The action does pick up near the end but the overall plot fell flat for me as it’s sparsely sprinkled throughout each character’s pov, which left the story without a sense of tension or even a build toward the ending. The plot scaffolding is there but not present enough to make the ending feel really impactful.

Where this book excels is in its character development—every one of the people onboard the Abeona felt real, nuanced and interesting with their own distinct voice. I was invested in each of them.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the book is made up of character backstories and there’s not enough on-page interaction between the characters, so the found family aspect is told but rarely ever shown. I know how the characters feel about some of their coworkers but I never got to experience them actually being a family.

Overall, I liked this, especially the character development, but was underwhelmed by the plot and the lack of the promised found family. It was fun discovering how each person came to be on the Abeona and how their stories contributed to the plot, but I wish there had been more on-page action as I was never fully invested in the mystery.

The Floating Hotel opens through the eyes of a child. Carl, 12-years-old at the novel's onset, stows away on a departing spaceship to sneak into the Abeona, a hotel that orbits through outer space. There, he encounters a luxury he never could have imagined from his impoverished upbringing and finds a lifelong career in hospitality and found family.

After that, each chapter introduces us to a different member of the hotel's staff or visitors. Most of the plot is fairly loosely connected, yet also not satisfyingly standalone. There is a mystery that connects all of the stories - a rebel thought leader publishing missives against the Emperor - but this plot shows up inconsistently and is resolved unsatisfyingly.

The comparisons to Becky Chambers's Wayfarers series has some merit (co-workers as chosen family, tragic pasts bringing them together on their journey), but it lacks the heart of her cozy series.

Ultimately, this book felt too in-between for me. The chapters aren't connected enough to be a thrilling political heist, but they are not independent enough to be self-contained short stories. The characters aren't warm and fuzzy enough for a cozy found family narrative. I enjoyed the premise and some of the individual chapters, but would like likely put the book down several times if this wasn't an ARC that I was reviewing.

I am still grateful to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this!

Two mysteries and even the sci-fi setting take back seat to the characters-- the story is told in chapters following a few of the staff and guests on the ship. Characters' backstories fill in some of the details of the universe. Although the main part of the story takes places over a couple days, because the we get each character's piece separately, the timeline doesn't become completely clear until the very end.

Suggest this to readers who like slower-paced sci-fi more focused on stories and characters. Not as heavy on the mystery as The Spare Man, but will likely appeal to a similar audience.

eARC from NetGalley.