This was such an interesting novel, a bit mystery, a bit sci-fi, a bit found-family all rolled into one. I couldn't help fall but in love with the Abeona, the same way all the staff did. I kept imagining something like a flying Titanic, filled with decadent wonders.

I really enjoyed the back stories of each member of staff and some of the key passengers. Some might think it covered too many characters, but I think that was what appealed to me. Knowing how and why each came to be on the Abeona was engrossing.

The only sticking point for me was the non-linear timeline in the last few chapters, which was confusing...until it all came together in the end.

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.

More a series of vignettes than a proper novel, though everything did come together at the end.

I read this over several weeks, a chapter or two at a time at the library while waiting for my kids. This led to it playing sort of like an anthology series on the movie screen in my mind, which was highly enjoyable. I would watch this show, 100%.

I feel like comparisons to Wes Anderson will be inevitable, there is a similar sort of postmodern whimsy present that can be difficult to nail. I do feel like the stakes may be TOO high for cozy purists, but I had a lot of fun.

By the first chapter, this book already had me smiling. This cozy sci-fi tells the story of a luxury spaceship hotel and the staff (and some guests) who are aboard. The chapters center on different people who share life on the ship, vignettes intertwined with the connecting thread of the main story. There are hints of oppression in the Empire outside this haven for the found family of the crew, and a search for a mystery rebel against the emperor.

This book is so charming and wonderful. At the end I was grinning. I really enjoyed the different characters the author brought to life. If you like Becky Chambers, you might like this. It has a similar vibe and found family appeal. Five stars for Floating Hotel! It comes out March 19. Thank you to DAW and Netgalley for the eARC.

Ohhhhh how I adored this book! It's so freaking good! I have so many things I want to say (aka gush about).

First of all, the writing is gorgeous - sometimes ethereal, sometimes gritty, always clear-eyed, intelligent, and picturesque. I felt like I was on board the Grand Abeona Hotel from the very first chapter, treading its gently worn parquet, sinking into a richly upholstered seat where I can smell the delicious alchemy of fire and food emanating from the controlled chaos of artists at work in the kitchen, hear the murmur of conversations softly accompanied by piano soundscapes, see the shrouded darkness of deep space creating a permanent midnight in the windows. The author skilfully breathes life into every scene, every character.

Second, the ship itself is a character in its own right - quaintly, opulently analog in a ubiquitously digital future, a dazzlingly high tech space hotel with a boutique antique aesthetic, including paper messages conveyed through old-timey glass suction tubes. Its sumptuous splendour attracts posh and posh-adjacent guests from across galaxies who want to slow down and savour a relaxing and decadent pleasure cruise through the stars. Its staff, however, are anything but glamorous - more of a rogues gallery of charming misfits.

Which brings me to my third point - the characters are unique, memorable, and utterly delightful. There's the perpetually cheerful and soft-hearted manager who grew up on board the hotel from a childhood stowaway. A seemingly mismatched pair of culinary maestros - one a meticulous perfectionist, one a brawny badass who's really a teddy bear underneath - form a dream team duo to create magic in the kitchen. There's a sweet and sunny concierge, a rough-around-the-edges lifeguard, a debonair assistant manager, a precise housekeeping manager, a brash and enigmatic mechanic, a brilliant and solitary engineer, a jaded professor, a quirky young mathematician, and a nervous new waitress whose confidence blossoms on board. The cast of characters is beautifully diverse in terms of age, race, gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, and disability, forming a lovely and colorful kaleidoscope. The narrative shifts through multiple character POVs, and the author gives each one their own distinct voice, personality, and story.

Fourth, the plot is engaging and intriguing. For decades, a revolutionary whistle-blower known as the Lamplighter has been publishing anonymous critiques of the empire, spilling their embarrassing secrets, from various locations across the universe, and authorities are beginning to suspect it's someone on board the hotel - what better way to hide in plain sight? The mystery of the Lamplighter's identity has attracted spies of various flavours - rebels trying to save them, and government forces/mercenaries trying to eliminate them.

Finally, the book is a love letter to the overworked, underpaid, underappreciated service industry. Anyone who has ever worked in this sector knows exactly how it feels to make everyone's lives a little better, a little cleaner, a little smoother, a little easier, but are often taken for granted, and will feel very seen by this book. If you've never worked in this field, be kind (and thankful) to those who do. I especially loved this aspect to the story.

I love cozy sci-fi, and Floating Hotel hits all of the notes I love (quirky characters, found family, rebels, geeky science/math stuff) while still feeling fresh and original. Fans of Becky Chambers or Martha Wells will likely have a great time. I'm so glad I read this book, and I was sorry when it ended. I hope to read more from this author.

Thanks to the author, to DAW Books, and to Netgalley for providing me with a free advance reader copy of the book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.

Floating Hotel by Grace Kurtis is a book with a unique structure. Each chapter is narrated from the point of view of a different character, be it a guest or a staff member of the Grand Abeona, a spaceship hotel orbiting around the galaxy. The characters' stories interweave and intersect, making it both the book's greatest strength and weakness. The novel follows the motley crew of the space hotel Abeona, from its friendly manager, Carl, to its grumpy accountant, Kipple, and the ever-eager Reggie. All the different staff members have their own stories to tell, and they come together in a tale of rebellion against the system, an encrypted message from beyond the stars, and the mystery of the Lamplighter. The question remains: can they extract the Lamplighter safely before the Empire gets to them? I am looking forward to revisiting Floating Hotel soon. Four of five strong stars for me!

The Floating Hotel is a cozy scifi novel about an aging luxury hotel spaceship, the staff who work there, and the guests who visit. Told from the perspective of different characters each chapter, it tells of the love and care the Grand Abeona receives from the people who call it home while embedded throughout is a more sinister story of a propagandist using it as a base to spread anti-Empire leaks and the spies there to aid and apprehend them.

I actually liked and really enjoyed The Floating Hotel, but I can’t but feel like it is a bit misguided in its effort. This is essentially two stories blended together—one where a young runaway named Carl stows onto a hotel who has risen up the ranks to become its owner and manager and the other is of opposing spies infiltrating the hotel base of a revolutionary called Lamplighter they either want to recruit or eliminate.

The former delivers on the cozy premise and has, in Carl, a protagonist I could root for and wanted to follow along with as he builds a home in this what is essentially a cruise spaceship and the band of misfits and outcasts he takes on as his staff. Each chapter focuses on one character and tells of their history, what brought them to the hotel, and what they are doing over the few days the book is set. The unconventional storytelling structure really works for it, giving cozy slice-of-life vibes as we go along learning about the different members of this found family.

Unfortunately, it does not work as well for the latter spy story with its much higher stakes and the requisite perspectives the book gives the respective spies that pretty much gives all the mystery away. I think it would have worked better having Carl as the protagonist as he gets embroiled in the conspiracy then including random vignette from different characters interwoven within. There’s also torture, murder, moral questions, and tension that are too heavy for the cozy classification.

And then there’s that ending. I actually found it to be emotionally satisfying, but not a great ending for the story it is telling. It is quite abrupt, does not tie up the story in a nice little bow, nor does it deliver cozy-worthy conclusions to the many characters it introduces.

There’s a lot to like and appreciate in The Floating Hotel and the unconventional choices it makes, but its whole may not be greater than the sum of its parts.

*Thank you to DAW for the eARC via NetGalley

This story has such a unique storytelling mechanism, following a different member of the crew or passenger of the Grand Abeona Hotel, a hotel-ship that flies through the galaxy on a path from planet to planet, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. I love how the different paths of the characters weave together to unwrap a mystery plaguing the Abeona - who is the mysterious Lamplighter?

There is some great commentary about the hospitality industry in here, as well as some anti-imperialist messages in the form of the quirkiness of the Abeona, some illegal movie watching (the emperor is not a fan of movies featuring non-human “aliens”), and the Lamplighter who is believed to be on the Abeona and sending out messages against the empire.

I had a blast reading this one and chuckled over so many of the silly things happening in this book during the cozy times at the start, but found myself wrapped up in the mystery and intrigue as the book went on and before I knew it, the book ended. I flew it faster than I thought I would and loved every second of it.

Thank you to DAW Books and Netgalley for my ARC of this book. These are my honest thoughts about the book.

Hmm. This book had some promising elements—competent writing, a good premise, and some engaging moments—but it just didn't deliver for me.

There were so many characters and each one was devoted a full chapter. They basically all carried the same weight (with a couple that felt completely superfluous). The only way I could identify who the main character was was by assigning that role to the first character introduced in the book. Essentially, too many characters, without any consistency, meant there was no one to really feel invested in.

As far as the plot, the first half of the book (with all the character introductions) was pretty much just noise. The plot didn't start to develop until the second half of the book. There was a thin mystery that began to unravel eventually, but its connection to the many characters felt vague and tenuous. There were moments where I was enthralled, but just as many where I was left with a sense of ennui.

Overall, this book felt haphazard and disjointed. It was both too much and too little—too many characters, too many subplots, too little focus on a main character, too thin of a main plot.

I would recommend this cozy sci-fi adventure to fans of Becky Chambers, anyone who likes a book which is really just a lot of connected short stories in a trench coat pretending to be a novel, or anyone who’s ever worked a retail or service industry job.

Set in a nostalgia-inspiring spaceship hotel that’s lovely but also falling apart a little and focused around a wonderful, well-developed ensemble cast, the book’s central heartbeat is a theme of self-determination and choice. I sometimes felt like the jump between POVs was jarring, and I found some POV characters more compelling than others, but all in all, I very thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Grace Curtis is clearly a sci-fi author to watch (and this definitely made me want to read her debut).

Thank you so much to DAW Books and Netgalley for the advance copy!

There was a lot about Floating Hotel that I liked - the retro spaceship cruise setting, mostly likeable and interesting characters and fun details behind the scenes at the hotel. The mystery is also good and kept me guessing.

Ultimately, though the structure didn’t completely work for me. Each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view and, while I enjoyed many of the characters and learning their back stories, I didn’t feel very connected to any of them and there seemed to be multiple storylines that didn’t all connect or even resolve.

The blurb also describes this as cozy science fiction and I feel that’s a bit misleading. While there are some found family and cozy aspects to the story, there’s also torture, murders, abject poverty, war, and planetary destruction (mostly, but not entirely in back stories.) Also, the ending is pretty ambiguous rather than happy. I think the cozy description set up an expectation for me that wasn’t realized.

Floating Hotel fully encompasses “home is where the heart is” - if home were a giant luxury hotel in space.

Grace Curtis’ writing is so incredibly whimsical and fun. The story is told linearly through different characters experiences both past and present aboard the Abeona. Everyone brings something to the table and to the story. I laughed, I cried, I yelled, and I wanted to book a room on the giant hotel in the stars immediately.

This book is perfect for anyone who loved wayfarers or wants something a little more cozy in their sci-fi.

I really enjoyed this. This was a really chill sci-fi romp with charming and compelling characters, and an interesting mystery. I had a fun, cozy time and I enjoyed the writing style. I think my only "complaint" is that with how many different POVs there were, I wish the different threads have woven together into the main narrative a little faster because as much as I loved getting to see each POV, I found myself wishing the pacing was a little quicker.

This was an unexpected read. There really isn't a main character in this story, or I suppose the main character is the Grand Abeona Hotel. I luxury hotel/spaceship floating through the cosmos. Nearly every chapter is told from a different character's perspective, some of them hotel workers and some of them guests. Grace Curtis does a fantastic job of interweaving each character into one overarching story while still making each character highly individualized with unique backstories. I was sad for this story to end, I wanted to know more about each character. I would highly recommend this story to anyone looking for a lower-stakes sci-fi story with a dash of melancholy and coziness. Thank you to Netgalley and DAW for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

I had heard great things about this book, but I didn’t know anything about the plot so every paragraph surprised me. The blurb mentions Becky Chambers and it reminded me a little bit of her, because this is a group of misfits who have become an unusual family. Set in the future, after Earth died and we’ve conquered space, the Grand Abeona Hotel wanders the Milky Way in a preset route. It has seen better days but the staff works hard to keep it going. The book not easy to describe, it has elements of mystery, thriller, sci-fi and a spy novel, but it’s none of those genres, or it’s all of them at once. The characters are not relatable but are so well written that you end up rooting for them. They all lived through rough times, but have made a new life at the Abeona thanks to Carl, the kind manager. The whole plot builds and weaves until the super-suspenseful final chapters. The ending is just perfect. Enjoyable, original and smart, this hotel gets five stars from me.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, #NetGalley/#DAW.

The Floating Hotel is a charming, chill scifi novel with a little bit of mystery and absolutely loveable characters.

The novel follows many different POVs of employees and guests of the hotel. Ive loved hearing all these peoples stories of how they got there. I just wish the two big plot threads would have been moved into the story earlier and tied it a bit more together, the start was kind of slow.

If you love character driven stories and just a little scifi but not too much in a gorgeous, whimsy location this will be a great story for you.

The Grand Abeona Hotel, a sub-orbital luxury resort, is the home to a fascinating cast of characters and one of them might be a political revolutionary hoping to destabilize the empire. As vacationers, conference goers, and imperial spies converge the intrigues multiply in this relatively cozy science fiction novel. I love the varied characters in this SF/Mystery and the interweaving of their stories to build the intrigue and illustrate the connections among the ragtag found family at its core.

Sadly Curtis' writing style is not my thing.
If you love long winded descriptors of basic things you will love this book.
Overall just didn't hold my interest enough.

Floating Hotel is a cozy science fiction story set on the Abeona Hotel, a ship that travels between planets hosting an eclectic mix of guests and employees.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I enjoyed the setting. Curtis did a fabulous job describing the old, past its prime ship hotel harkening to older historic hotels. Unfortunately, I didn't find myself captured after the initial few chapters and found myself unmotivated to keep reading until around 50-60% when some of the stories started to connect and the overall pace picked up. What I found challenging were the frequent switches not only between character points of view but also the complete changes in the focus of the story some of which didn't really connect to each other. The changes would also happen just as I was engaged in the previous character and their story. Each chapter is essentially a different character's story. I found some more enjoyable and interesting than others. The book is definitely cozy, and I think will have readers who will love getting these glimpses into the lives of both guests and employees alike, it unfortunately just wasn't me.

Thank you to NetGalley and DAW for an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All expressed opinions are my own.

What a fun read to kick off the new year! Each chapter of Floating Hotel features a different passenger or crew member on board the hulking Grand Abeona Hotel as it saunters through the galaxy and Grace Curtis paints vivid portraits of the ragtag cadre of characters. While spending limited time with and shifting through each person’s perspective may be disorienting for some, there is a captivating mystery at the core of the book that provides a compelling thread connecting each distinct section.

The tone of the book vibrates on a similar frequency as Josiah Bancroft’s “Books of Babel” series — there are airships, class divides, a dash of whimsy, and a hodgepodge of peculiar characters, each aboard the vessel for a different reason.

There were some deliciously dark details that might make some question the “cozy” genre classification, but the story and characters exude charm, Curtis’s writing flows beautifully, and I raced through each chapter until reaching the final page. All in all, I greatly enjoyed my time spent aboard the Grand Abeona Hotel.