Customer Reviews

Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a sometimes touching, sometimes funny story of one night in the nouveau chic Finbar's Hotel of Dublin. You will meet a woman getting impregnated by her best friend's husband, a career woman and her crazy father, a bride-to-be who gets the ultimate revenge on an old boyfriend who did her wrong, a nun looking for love in a most unorthodox manner, a mother reunited with the son she gave up for adoption, a woman who follows her husband to find out if he's cheating on her, and an aging actress who wants to recapture the past. Their paths all cross on one night at this hotel.

I chose the book because I am a big fan of Maeve Binchy and she wrote one of the chapters. Guessing which author wrote which chapter becomes a guessing game for the reader familiar with these authors.

This is not as good as Binchy's own novels, but definitely enjoyable and worth your time.

This is the second "Finbar's Hotel," collection edited by Bolger, and this one is given over to seven Irish women writers: Maeve Binchy, Clare Boylan, Emma Donoghue, Anne Haverty, Eilis Ni Dhibhne, Kate O'Riordan and Deirdre Purcell. As in the first one (which had only two women, Anne Enright and Jennifer Johnston), each writer is given a "room" of the hotel, and creates a guest and a story to explain their presence at the hotel. And as in the first one, the writer of each story is not identified. One has to wonder at the point of such cleverness, as it is a directly impedes any attempt on the reader's part to discover a new writer to seek out in the future. For example, say I find two of the seven stories to be amazing, what am I to do? Buy one book by each of the seven writers and read all seven to figure out whose writing it was that I liked? Since there's no real purpose to keeping the authors secret (other than editorial conceit), why do it?

The strongest stories reside in rooms 101 and 106, which contain stories that revolve around marital infidelity, but have gentle reversals. Room 104 also concerns infidelity, but in this case, to God-and is much less interesting. Rooms 102, 103, 105 and the penthouse all contain guests coming from abroad and their stories all revolve around encounters with their past. Room 105, which concerns a mother meeting her son for the first time is perhaps the best of them, although the penthouse story is worth reading for the ending if nothing else. One sort of odd running thread is the clumsy mocking of Americans that appears in each story, which is in contrast the generally gentle tone of the collection. All in the all, the collection is inoffensive, but not quite as strong as the original Finbar's Hotel.

"Ladies Night at Finbars Hotel" is a great book. I am a big fan of Maeve Binchy's writing, and am waiting for her next book to come out. Meanwhile I saw she had contributed to this book, so I picked it up.

For those of you familiar with Binchy's writing, you'll notice how every chapter leads into the next, and the characters lives intertwine. The same happens in this book.

Each chapter revolves around a guest in a particular room. One truly becomes engrossed in their lives.

The writers all write along the same vein, so it is actually difficult to tell which author wrote which chapter. But that does not matter, all that matters is it is a good book which you will not want to put down. Order it today!

A sequel to the original Finbar's Hotel, both edited by Dermot Bolger, this book follows the original format of having several well-respected Irish writers each write a chapter (unattributed) regarding a different room or charactor (porter, owner) on the same night in a Dublin Hotel. For this book, all the authors are women, including the popular Maeve Binchy, and the hotel has been spiffed up from its former seediness. Perhaps the seedier side of the Liffey is more interesting, for this has all the excitement of your basic hotel room decor. While the scenarios and problems of each charactor are varied (birth mother meeting son 27 years later, a nun with a rendezvous, a penniless faded film star with an illict guest in the penthouse she can't pay for) the writing and charactorizations never strike out beyond the realm of predicatability. In the first book, the common thread of charactors popping up in each others stories added another layer of interst, but each story could stand on its own merit as well. In this, the plot and places feel forced, the mention of charactors from other stories imposed on the story. While in the first, half the fun was trying to figure out who wrote each story (authors names are not given to any story), for ladie's night, it hardly matters. One story feels much like another. While the stories are pleasant reads, they never reach beyond (I hate to say it) Ladies Magazine fiction to the level of true literary fiction.

I must say that unlike the other reviewers who all love Binchy, I bought the book because I have great love for Irish poets, and this book offered a chance to support the female writers.

I was not previously aware of any of the other writers, and not overly knowledgable of Binchy's works, and therefore it was impossible for me to tell who wrote which chapter. I'm wondering if this can be an impediment to a writer trying to be noticed, that she writes a piece in a collection, only to have her name excluded from it.

In any case, I think it was a charming book, better than I thought it would be. It held my attention throughout, and was quite touching in most of the sections. This is not really a serious read, but the stories interweave in an interesting way and the characters are interesting.

This one is not nearly as good as the first one (Finbar's Hotel), but it is fun, light reading. If you plan to read them both, I would read this one first to save the better one for last.

I must say that unlike the other reviewers who all love Binchy, I bought the book because I have great love for Irish poets, and this book offered a chance to support the female writers.

I was not previously aware of any of the other writers, and not overly knowledgable of Binchy's works, and therefore it was impossible for me to tell who wrote which chapter. I'm wondering if this can be an impediment to a writer trying to be noticed, that she writes a piece in a collection, only to have her name excluded from it.

In any case, I think it was a charming book, better than I thought it would be. It held my attention throughout, and was quite touching in most of the sections. This is not really a serious read, but the stories interweave in an interesting way and the characters are unusual.

I bought this book because I saw Maeve Binchey's name on it. As much as I love her writing, I have not read much Irish fiction, and this looked like a fun book.

The book is a set of short stories that have inter-connecting characters in the stories. Each chapter was written by a different author, and I had fun trying to figure out who wrote which chapter. The story itself was light and fun, but not as much as I had hoped.

I enjoyed reading Ladies Night at Finbar's hotel, and would highly recommend it as a vacation or beach read. Nothing too deep to get lost in.

As I closed the back cover, the first words that came to mind were disappointing and pointless. No other words are necessary; these capture the essence of Ladies Night. This follow-up to Finbar's Hotel lacks the warmth, charm and wit of the original. If you are considering this book, my advice: save your money.

This collection of slightly interwoven short stories will delight lovers of Irish fiction - particularly of the entertaining and wonderful Maeve Binchy type. (I'm guessing that she wrote "The Wedding of the Pughs"!)

The last chapter which involves a fading movie star and a tiger is the perfect comic end to these tales. I will now explore the work of these other writers!