I didn't realise this was a cosy sci-fi when I requested it and that's on me I guess - I don't like cosy fantasy/sci-fi so I don't feel like I can properly rate and review this.

The writing and characterisation (up until I put it down) were good, though. No problems with the writing at all, it was descriptive and nice to read. The characters and all of their backstories were fun, and the worldbuilding was well thought out and interesting. Just 100% not my subgenre.

I think this was a case of wrong time, right book. I wanted to enjoy this, having loved the author's previous book, but it didn't gel with me. It was beautifully written but a little too slow paced for me.

Imagine a book written from the perspectives of the people living on the space ship in Wall:E during the first few years before it started getting a bit mad, add to that the intriguing masterpiece of the grand marigold hotel mix in a fully realised dystopian future in which humans have taken to space travel, there is an emperor and thought-police levels of control and you have this book. I really enjoyed every second of it. The characters are incredible. My only complaint is that I need more!

Today is my stop on the tour for Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis! Thank you so much to the lovely @pridebooktours & @hodderscape for my beautiful copy and for having me on the tour!

I loved the concept of this book! The idea of a ragtag group of people finding safety together in a floating hotel screams found family vibes to me which you all know I love!

The characters were very interesting and I really liked getting to know each of them with a POV chapter dedicated to each person. It was so cool to see how each of them came to the hotel and where they all came to fit in. And whilst I really liked the worldbuilding in the book, I would’ve loved a little more just to round it out and get fully immersed into it!

Floating Hotel is a very cute and quick read with some very interesting characters! 💖

Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the advance reader copy.

I think that a lot of people will enjoy this book due to it being within the cosy fantasy genre. The book is a collection of stories surrounding the staff and visitors of a space hotel and their experiences.

I think personally cosy fantasy isn’t a genre that I enjoy a lot which is what has affected my rating of the book.

I found the writing was well done, but being thrown into varying stories left me a little disjointed whilst reading because I was want able to settle into a story.

Overall, if you like this genre it is well written but unfortunately wasn’t a book I enjoyed.

I found this book quite enjoyable! It offered a thrilling space adventure with a diverse array of characters hailing from various backgrounds, each offering their unique perspective. While some sections initially felt a tad sluggish, the pace picked up significantly towards the end, leaving me thoroughly engaged. Overall, it was a delightful, brief read that left a lasting impression.

The Grand Abeona Hotel is a luxury hotel, a spaceship that travels the galaxy and offers the finest of everything. It is love at first sight for 12-year-old Carl who runs away to join it. 40 years later he is the manager. Mysteries and secrets surround guests and staff while the Abeona itself is its own enigma. There are things happening beyond Carl's power, things in the galaxy that affect them. That are dangerous for the hotel. Is the Abeona's future in jeopardy?

Lush writing with a whimsical flair, quite clever in its comfy value, harboring sparks of intensity. So many wondrous details to sate our imagination. The descriptions and servings of info are mostly wordy, a welcome sensory feast. The ins and outs of a hotel are always fascinating to witness and this one takes the cake. Odd things that pique your curiosity like love poems appearing through the tube system, the Problem Solver's Conference and who drives the ship!

If you like stories of multiple characters, oftentimes with their own chapters, learning their origins and then having them interwoven into the main story, you will love this. It is a great source of material for someone to study and ponder human nature. The interjections between chapters about what is really happening in the Empire amp up the intrigue as does the idea that the notion of alien lifeforms is illegal and their possible existence considered absurd.

There is unevenness to the book in as to some parts don't reach the level of interest of others. Or better said some stories are much longer than others, taking more time (maybe too long) to get to the point. Sometimes parts of the character chapters feel a little too disjointed from the main thread of the plot, the back and forth between past and present a bit jarring.

The phrase that came to mind reading this book was "different folks. different strokes". We all belong to a society but we are also each our own universe. We have encounters with humanity's superiority complex and the constant, unfortunate need for a societal system where some are considered better than others. But the hotel is one big, content, found family.

Can a story be charming even in gut-wrenching moments, with a humorous demeanor yet ominous and simultaneously introspective? Yes, if it's this story with its intimate grasp on human behavior. It is intriguing while hinting at adventure, just like a floating hotel should be. The Floating Hotel is a cozy sci-fi with teeth.

This is a very slow burn read. I found it quite relaxing and I also took my time reading through it. It’s a lovely story, nothing traumatic, just a story of a luxury cruise ship in space with a mystery going on in the background.

I liked it!

My thanks to Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this book! It was a fun space adventure with lots of different characters, all from various backgrounds, and it was fun to read all of their POVs. Although some parts seemed a little bit slow to start, I found it really picked up by the end and I loved the short but sweet read.

I love Becky Chamber's books and when I saw that Floating Hotel has the same vibes as her books, I was interested straight away in requesting. And for one, it truly is! This was a charming book and I enjoyed reading it immensely. This book was cozy, heartwarming and wholesome at times, and at the second half, fun due to the "mystery" subplot. I really liked the multi character POV but it definitely made it harder for me to get attached to the characters (although I have soft spots for Ooly, Azad, Daphne, Dunk and Carl). However, I still think that the execution was great because although we are reading from different points of views and about different lives all the time, there was still a thread connecting these POVs together with the other characters popping up (of this, I'm comparing it with another book that also has a multi character POV that I've read once and didn't like, because it wasn't able to add anything to the story at all. So I really appreciate Floating Hotel for that).

Although framed as a science-fiction novel and set aboard a hotel floating in space and to a degree living on past glories, this could just as easily have been set on an ocean liner in the 1920s, and would perhaps have been the better for it - there is precious little here to appeal to sci-fi fans, whereas readers of the likes of GK Chesterton or Graham Greene would probably find a lot to recommend this title.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the search for a mysterious character who is attempting to undermine the galactic empire, and is nicely told through the eyes of various characters. However, the main character in the book is probably the hotel itself, which is nicely described. The other characters - other than a couple - are less well drawn. The story is developed nicely throughout the book with information being drip-fed.

The author has tried to be inclusive, one of the characters using the 'they' pronoun - however, this looks like a late addition to the story as there is at least one place in the novel where the character is referred to as 'he'.

An enjoyable read, but don't expect hard sci-fi, this is more of a lightweight, enjoyable read, but better drawn characters would have earned an extra star.

Delightfully bittersweet, soft science fiction tale for fans of Becky Chambers. Character driven with a touch of suspense!

I loved this from start to finish! In a lot of ways this is like a love letter to folks in the service industry: the magic they create, the community they share, the good and the bad days. This is an exploration of the magic of connections between loved ones, enemies, strangers, and friends.

The narration is so lovely. There are achingly pretty lines:

"Sometimes when Azad was translating she could almost feel a human presence on the other side of the paper, like the shape and warmth of a stranger's hand against a pane of frosted glass."

There are also abruptly funny moments:

"Mataz sighed. 'Don't you think it's sexy when a man doesn't know what's going on?'"

If you want a delightful read that is curious and whimsical while grounded in great character work, please pick this one up!

I absolutely love this book!

At it’s heart, this is a novel all about redemption, resilience and rebellion. It’s less sci-fi and more mystery, less fantasy and more crime. Even though it’s set hundreds of years into the future on board a space-travelling hotel, this book is all about the working class characters — their pasts, their presents, their dreams (unfulfilled or not), and their uncertain futures. Each character is rough and rugged but deeply lovable too; their relationships become deeper than you think; the ending is bittersweet.

This might just be my new favourite book, just for the characters alone. However, I fully loved the multi-character narrative, the non-linear nature of the chapters, the epistolary ‘dispatches’, and the way the mystery was drip-fed into multiple climaxes…this was a beautifully crafted book in all aspects. One I will definitely be recommending and rereading.

Thanks to NetGalley for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley for a free electronic copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Floating Hotel is the story of the Grand Abeona, an elegant and luxurious spaceship hotel, journeying around the galaxy. A magnet for the lost and those with pasts best left in the past, the Abeona is staffed by a colourful crew of misfits, outsiders, and runaways, thrust together into a found family.

Floating Hotel manages to perfectly blend cosy, slice of life stories, intriguing characters, and sci-fi, with a plot that seems loose at first, but really ramps up from around the halfway mark. Managing to increase the stakes and urgency but maintain the heart, this book is exceptional. I particularly loved Carl, Daphne, and Dunk, but the whole cast of characters was fantastic.

Dnf at 30 %

If you like a cozy and boring story about a hotel in space, then this is perfect for you.
Every chapter is told by another person. After a few pages, you think: "Oh, I really like this character" but then it's already the next chapter with someone else telling the story and it's very hard to get into it if you just do not care about the character.
Since I didn't finish it, I can't really judge this book very well but I definitely got the feeling of misfits.
And the interesting setting was unlike everything I've read before.

Maybe I will try to read this again at some point.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. :)

Floating Hotel is a wonderfully impressive Sci-Fi novel that gave me cosy fantasy vibes, despite the complex web of intrigue the plot weaves. I was already a fan of Grace Curtis having read and loved her debut Frontier last year - having now read Floating Hotel, I can confirm she is an author whose books I’ll always make time to read whenever they’re released!

Two books in, and Grace Curtis is already making a name for herself as a master craftsman of distinct and interesting Point of View characters in her novel. As with her previous book, we rarely get a repeat character giving a chapter perspective in Floating Hotel, meaning the narrative is passed between different characters like a relay race! In terms of scale, I think Floating Hotel is attempting something far more ambitious than Frontier. In a hotel setting, the result is a fabulously rich and all encompassing feel to the novel, where you really get to know all the cast members in exquisite detail. The world of the book seems to grow perpetually bigger as we add in more of these POV chapters, as each character has their own background, their own friends and familial connections - were the novel any longer, I think I would struggle to keep all the side characters in my head!

One drawback I personally found with the book is that some of the plotlines felt a bit neglected amongst everything that was going on, while others ended up a little rushed. Without spoiling anything, I thought the Lamplighter plot had a good setup and some brilliant tense moments in the novel, but ultimately fell a little flat for me. Similarly, I think the conference plotline could also have been better if it had a little more screen time in the novel; the setup chapter for this thread was excellent, and I quite liked the conclusion too, but this is a thread that disappeared for a good chunk of the middle.

Ultimately, I love how the book maintained a cosy feel despite the bustling atmosphere and large cast. I think the comparison to the Grand Budapest Hotel is a good one, and I also see a touch of Downton Abbey in there too! While I feel the book does try to achieve an ambitious amount, and while I think some individual parts could be improved, I really enjoyed reading Floating Hotel and seeing all the plotlines weave around one another.

This was such an entertaining cosy read, i loved the science fiction aspect of it, and the world buidling!

Well I don't read a lot of sci.Fi, But I can actually say that This book has actually changed my mind I feel like i'm a big fan.

I really loved the plot behind This story I thought it was absolutely fantastic It really did Call the carpet from under my genuinely.Thought I would know what was gonna happen next and then I didn't and what happened.I just did not expect.
The whole book was pure delight.

As for the characters I absolutely loved the main character Full of charm full of wit and really Courageous In very many ways.

There's nothing that I would want to change about this story.It genuinely was entertaining And I just got more and more engrossed in every page.

As for the writing, I thought it was just perfection.There isnothing else that need to be Said.

Thank you again to the wonderful publishers for letting me review this amazing

I'm rating A huge galaxy of five stars

It was a warm,cozy and visual read. I Loved the ability of the author to create a incredible characters driven and captivating story while maintaining an immersive background!

All this just to say that I read this in one setting and gave him 5 stars!

So at first I got Hotel Magnifique vibes, with mysteries surrounding the hotel and staff seemingly not who they say they are. The more I read the more I realised it wasn't like Hotel Magnifique at all, but it's own story.

I did get very confused in parts as it went between past and present and I wasn't always able to discern if I was reading a characters past or not. Other than that I felt like the story was solid and I was invested in finding out who the lamplighter was. I think it was revealed at the end, but I'm not 100% certain if we did find out the truth.

I loved the relationship between Daphne and Rogan, I wish we got more of them and I wish we found out what happened to everyone after the events of the book. As it stood, the story ended with Carl and nothing more was really said about the other characters. I'm wondering if this is a red herring ending so it's up to our interpretation.

Either way I really enjoyed this read and it read it in a day.