Una joven de diecisiete años se escapa de su casa en Londres para ir a Los Ángeles y asistir al funeral de su madre, Lily, que la abandonó cuando tenía apenas tres años. Tras robar una maleta llena de cartas, ropa y fotografías del dormitorio de su madre, situado en la última planta del Hotel Rosa de Venice Beach, la joven se pasa el verano recorriendo Los Ángeles, un Los Ángeles muy alejado de los tópicos de sol, playa y glamour, para devolver fotografías y cartas de amor a los hombres que conocieron a Lily. A medida que descubre cosas sobre el pasado de ésta e intenta reconstruir su vida, va cuestionándose su propia identidad.

It's an interesting premise, but I kept thinking it would work better as an indie movie than as a novel. The picaresque nature of it would lend itself to film, and really not enough happens for a whole book. I was not wowed by the writing in this one, either. But I did like the main character, and her father. ( )

It's an interesting premise, but I kept thinking it would work better as an indie movie than as a novel. The picaresque nature of it would lend itself to film, and really not enough happens for a whole book. I was not wowed by the writing in this one, either. But I did like the main character, and her father. ( )

Lily is dead. Lily’s daughter (I can find no other name for her) knows little about her mother. She sneaks into the pink hotel her mother ran for her mother’s wake. Impulsively, she steals her mother’s red suitcase. And thus begins the adventure, the noir mystery that is this book.

Mystery is a solid one-word summary of this story. Lily’s daughter doesn’t know much about her mother. Lily’s daughter’s dad doesn’t know much about Lily’s daughter. Lily’s daughter doesn’t know much about herself. She wanders around the pink hotel and the other places important to her mother and gets to know a little about the mother she never knew and the people her mother loved and even a little about herself.

I liked this book very much. ( )

The Pink Hotel by the young author Anna Stothard is just one rung up from a YA novel. A young woman arrives from London to attend the funeral of her mother whom she has hardly known, and begins a search for her father and people who can tell her more about her mother. This search, and the structure of the story, is conveniently facilitated by her theft of a suitcase which contains some of her mothers' personal belongings and letters. Each item or letter is the peg for another adventure. The setting of the story, and the backdrop of her search is the wild, lawless scene of Los Angeles of the US, as the story unfolds beginning with a sex-and-drugs lecherous party in her mother's the private apartment at the Pink Hotel.

The novel has all the characteristics of a badly written, style and thoughtless bravura by an adolescent author discovered by an editor who needs to score with a talent-in-the-bud. It is a stir-fry of sex, drugs, expletives and brainless story. ( )