The Grand Abeona Hotel travels among the stars, picking up the richest of the rich as it goes along. Many of its crew and management are desperate stowaways who have made the hotel their family. But there are dark undercurrents. Someone seems to have disposed of a body in a bathtub. There may be a spy on board. Is one of the passengers a notorious rebel journalist known as the Lamplighter?
Despite some gore, it has the cozy vibe of The Sol Majestic by Ferrett Steinmetz.
Sol Majestic has a more lyrical style and a tighter story arc. I also wish Abeona’s technology had been given more attention. ( )

A book with its heart in the right place and good intentions. Ultimately, it tries to do too much, but I still ended up enjoying it.

There is Abeona, a hotel-shaped oasis in an evil (of course it’s evil) Galactic Empire.

“Not for Abeona were the sharply curled edges of a gilt pedestal, the bone-bruising hardness of a veined marble floor, sallow gold and lace trim. … It looked like something somebody loved.”

Here are the guests and the employees with their backstories, and here are those who would rebel against the Empire. It starts off cozy. Come and follow Carl the manager (who is too nice to have this job, if you ask me); Uwade at the reception (good backstory); Dunk the sous-chef (“People sometimes asked Dunk what he’d be of he wasn’t a chef. … “Easy,” he’d say. “I’d be dead.”); Acad the grumpy linguistics professor; Ooly the math genius with bad social skills (such a cliché, but the author makes it work) etc etc etc. There is some Shakespeare and other poetry that made me smile in happy recognition. There are movie nights. The plot veers off into darker territory quite fast, though. Increased reading speed detected!

My problem was too many POV’s, all the characters hardly had space to breathe, so some were more well-written than others. I wasn’t impressed with the undercover agents’ chapters, for example. There were too many stories in one book, too many themes. We spent too little time on the big reveal and I had to suspend disbelief a couple of times. But there were brilliant scenes, passages, conversations, and a life-affirming ending.

3.7 encouraging stars, rounded up.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-book! ( )

A weird book, but not an unpleasant one — I loved the soaring imagination of the hotel, the kindness of the staff and the found family of it all. It had a surprisingly continuous plotline despite hopping points of view, and I did love the integrity of the solutions offered. The big badness of the empire was both too over the top and all too believeable.

All the same, because we kept skipping points of view it was hard to get invested.

Advanced Readers Copy provided by edelweiss. ( )

I think this book could be best described as a cozy SciFi with a bit of mystery sprinkled in. The blurb intrigued me and it definitely lived up to it (mysterious love poems - sonnets to be precise- and all). It takes place on the Grand Abeona - an intergalactic hotel. While we do see snippets of the guests, the story focuses on the experiences of the staff, some of whom snuck aboard as stowaways (in one case to retrieve a countess's forgotten muff) and find friendship like they have never known before. I also loved the little drawings at the start of each chapter!

I loved reading about the hotel. It seems so fantastical (and of course reserved for the richest of the rich). The elegance of beauty of the hotel reminds me a bit of The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern), but it is light and elegant where the circus is more dark and gritty. The style and events are very different too. I would love to see the Galactic Diorama (think an artistic ever-changing map of the solar system that shows the position of the ship). It sounds like such a marvelous sight to behold. And despite all the glory and beauty that the guests experience, there is still a very real and functional ship behind the scenes (something I appreciated the author mentioning). I also enjoyed all the random little tidbits the author threw in about space travel that one would not necessarily consider (e.g. the lack of signal for most of the journey and the fact that people can't just leave because oops, they aren't close to anything). I feel like a lot of it might be based on how cruises function and has been expanded to a space setting. I definitely enjoyed the thought put into the hotel, its functioning and its surroundings. Given that space tourism is already (somewhat) a thing, I could definitely see the rich deciding t holiday in space in the future (even if not in quite this much of a tour like manner).

I loved the characters and their interactions. But that being said, there were a lot of them and it took me a while to be able to keep track of everyone. A character list would have been super helpful. There were a couple of points where I found myself wondering who a character was when we started following them, but I usually remembered within a couple of paragraphs. A list would still have been helpful though (especially should someone put down the book for a few days). All the characters were clearly well thought out and had distinct personalities. I enjoyed how close they all were and their movies nights. Working in such isolated conditions is definitely incredible for team comradery and the author captured this beautifully. I loved Unwade and how she likes that her physical prominence means that she is largely unnoticed by the guests and can go about solving mysteries undisturbed. Oh, and of course I love Garbage, because who doesn't love a pet rat?

If a found family story set in a space hotel sounds like your kind of book, I definitely suggest that you pick this one up. The writing is beautiful and the characters are lovely (even if they have to deal with not so lovely circumstances with the guests sometimes). This is definitely a ship I'd love to visit again, be it in real life or between the pages of a book.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. As always, all opinions are my own. ( )