Customer Reviews

Hotel Paradise

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I must disagree with the reader who skewers this book so dreadfully (regarding a 12 year-old's vocabulary). Perhaps one of the reasons I responded so viscerally to Grimes' book is that I was a 12 year-old exactly like this narrator--bookish and full of Victorian words better written than pronounced. In "Hotel Paradise," Grimes creates a book that completely pulled me in and when it ended, I was saddened because then I had to give up the narrator's world, one I happily entered for a period of hours. I will collect Martha Grimes' books happily now (this was my first one). I most heartily recommend this book to anyone who likes books for the way they are written, and to those who can use their own imaginations when they read--after all, isn't that part of the fun of reading fiction? Grimes is no dime-store novel simpleton. Her words leap off of the page and the phrases in "Hotel Paradise" are almost edible. Buy this book in hardcover and loan it to a friend when you are finished.

This is the second of Martha Grimes books which depart from her usual fun English mystery format and I think it is much more successful than the first attempt. This book tells the story of a 12 year old girl living with her Mother in a run-down resort hotel who becomes obsessed with understanding why a girl her age drowned in the lake in front of their property 40 years ago. It is really a great coming of age story about a young girl who has been emotionally abandoned by her family and who needs find a place for herself and understand that sometimes one person in a family may become the family scapegoat for reasons they can't control. You will love the main character. She is spunky and intelligent and brave. This book is usually cataloged in the mystery section but is really just good fiction and shouldn't be overlooked by those people who say "I don't read mysteries".

I have to disagree with the negative reviews printed here. Hotel Paradise is exactly the kind of book I love to read. I took it on vacation and lounged in the sun with it for several days. As soon as it ended, I started it again. Martha Grimes obviously has a great respect for young people and their intuitive view of the adult world. I wasn't bothered at all at the lack of plot action or mystery resolution. The resolution is there for readers to decipher on their own. Can't wait to discuss this book with my Mother Daughter book group.

This is--without a doubt--my all-time favorite book. I love it!

Our 12 year-old heroine (whose name is not revealed until the very end of the book) has a hard life. What is perhaps one of the more brilliant aspects of the book, is that she honestly doesn't realize how hard her life is. Working 3 meals a day, 7 days a week as a waitress (something that an adult would never stand for), she is ignored by most adults and tormented by the closest thing she has to a contemporary: the awful Regina Jane Davidow.

Of course, one of the other brilliant points of the book is that her life isn't nearly as miserable as she believes it to be, either.

Her only friends are Maude, the waitress, and Sam, the sheriff (featured characters in the like-wise brilliant "End of the Pier"). But even Maude and Sam can't follow her when she delves into the past, back into a 40 year-old death which haunts her thoughts. What exactly did happen to Mary Evelyn Devereau? What ever became of Ben Queen? Who is the mysterious "Girl" who keeps appearing and disappearing? Most of all--how can one little girl put to rest the ghosts of another child who died nearly 30 years before she was born?

From the first line of Chapter 2, you know this is going to be a good book. "My mother was not a Paradise." Isn't that the most perfect line you've ever read? I only wish it were the first line of the entire book. Ms. Grimes is beyond a doubt one of the most talented fiction writers (ignore the whole "mystery" genre--this woman can WRITE) of our generation. I only wish she had an editor who would guide her a little more. Sometimes she does stray from her characters a bit. But all things considered, it is very hard to find fault with a masterpiece such as this.

It is a mystery novel of sorts, but there is not a bit of formula, and I enjoyed the nods to Rebecca and To Kill a Mockingbird. The protagonist is an engaging young girl who is a complex mixture of intelligence, sophistication, strength of character, sensitivity, and vulnerability. In a sense, this is more of a rite of passage story than it is a mystery story.

The prose is richly written, describing landscapes, people, and character interactions with an other-worldliness that haunts the reader. If you are looking for something more character-driven than the usual whodunit, and you can live with some ambiguity, I think you'll enjoy this book.

This book begins a trilogy that surpasses the genre of mysteries. The development of Emma as a young narrator is both real and poignant and humorous--I found I was thinking of her as a real human being, whose brave acceptance of the life she's been given moved me. If you enjoyed To Kill A Mockingbird, or even Anne of Green Gables when you were young, you should find this book and enter this beautifully drawn world of a South from not so long ago.

I've read most of Grimes' Richard Jury mysteries and have enjoyed them enough to pick-up the next one I run across. But nothing in these novels prepared me for the excellence of this book. Gentle and flowing, the writing pulls you in and holds you captivated in the shadowy interior world of a teenage girl coming of age - a world halfway between dream and reality yet totally believable. The best writing I have encountered in a long, long time.

Has anyone else found that Hotel Paradise is one of the Most Important Books they have ever read? It is Martha Grime's equivalent of the Magic Flute, a Mozartian masterpiece, a joyous, magical work unlike any other novel I've ever encountered! I did not want it to end; I was spellbound, entranced, transported to my own childhood where everything burgeoned on the edge of mystery. Mystical, earthy, evocative -- it was everything you could possibly want a novel to be. Even the Proverbial One Book You'd Want on a Desert Island! Well, for me -- this is it.

I really enjoyed this book. I have long been a fan of Martha Grimes and her Richard Jury series and this is the first book of hers that I have read that does not center around that British crime solver. One of the things that I loved about it was its' humor and I have not seen another reviewer refer to that. I found myself smiling at the 12 year old's train of thought. Not all of the characters are fully developed, but that may be left to other books that are concerned with this distinctly American location by Martha Grimes. I am looking forward to dropping into Cold Flat Junction and The End of the Pier to see what Maud and Sam and others are up too.

I loved this novel and thoroughly enjoy Emma Graham as the narrator. Grimes did a wonderful job, the characters are full, there is humour and conflict, light and shadows which just adds to the atmosphere.

Truly an enjoyable read!