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Hotel 21
Hotel 21: The 'funny, poignant and completely heart-warming' debut novel | Senta Rich
2 posts | 2 read | 1 to read
'A sharp, funny, poignant and completely heart-warming story about female friendship and kick-ass women. I truly loved it!' Ruth Hogan 'I have a first-day rule. Any sign of trouble, even a whiff of a problem, and I walk.' Noelle is an efficient and friendly hotel cleaner, a model employee. Or so she'd have you think. The trouble is that she can't help taking little 'souvenirs' as she cleans. Nothing of value, just tokens of happy, normal lives: a lipstick, a hair clip, some tweezers. And by the time the guest has noticed, she's long gone. As she starts at her 21st hotel, she's determined to beat her record of one month in a five star hotel before suspicion falls on her. But when she meets her new colleagues, her plans are complicated. These women aren't just hands pushing carts down lonely hotel corridors: they are women with lives full of happiness and worry, pain and joy. The kind of lives Noelle has never known how to live. They make her wonder what it might be like to have real friends, people to stick around for... Will the women at Hotel 21 give her the courage to claim the life she deserves, or will her old habits come back to haunt her? Reader Reviews 'I raced through this book I couldn't put it down... whatever emotion it was making me feel, I loved it' 'It really is a beautiful novel about what it is to be human, to be so deeply alone and the significance and importance of connecting with others.' 'Senta Rich's writing is just wonderful to read.'
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CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian
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Mehso-so

I liked a lot of this book: the comraderie between the women cleaners in the hotel, the matter-of-fact but empathetic way the protagonist's kleptomania and abusive childhood were handled, the fact that the queer romance didn't cure her. But there are drawbacks that make me hesitate to recommend it. Namely: patronizing, ableist, tired depiction of someone who uses a wheelchair and an annoyingly repetitive emotional beat in the last 5+ chapters.

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GerardtheBookworm
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Pickpick

A likeable, klepto protagonist (she only steals small things that guests leave behind) with OCD tendencies gets a job at her twenty-first hotel as housekeeping. However, it's the close bonds and connections that she makes with the current staff that helps her heal from past traumas and personal issues in this book that is a working stuff's version of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

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