Overall this was a really fun story with a great blend of poignant and light-hearted moments - definitely adding it to my list of comfort reads! In the distant future most of the human race has fled a ravaged Earth to find new life on other planets. For those who stayed a lawless society remains. Technology has been renounced, and saints and sinners, lawmakers and sheriffs, travelers and gunslingers, abound. There is an undercurrent of something more sinister that we see dappled throughout what almost feels like loosely linked short stories. Betrayal, theft, conspiracy, murder all appear throughout the course of this book. Thanks to NetGalley and DAW for an advance reader copy of Floating Hotel. This review expresses my honest opinions. Release date 19-Mar-2024.

I really liked the setting, both the hotel and the wider galaxy surrounding it - it felt well-drawn and realistic. Told in a series of vignettes and interludes, the story begins in the future on a ruined, mostly-abandoned Earth. The sparse population that remains struggles to survive in spite of a corrupt justice system, dwindling water supplies, and starvation. Most folk cling to a new religion that worships Gaia—a female planet-god that binds them close to her heart through gravity and an encouraged hatred of technology. Like Frontier, this book is heavily character driven. We meet a new character each chapter, dipping into their world and their story. While it was the main character’s journey that helped string the previous book’s chapters together, in this book it is the hotel, Abeona. Each chapter gives insights not only into the characters, but the hotel. You could argue the hotel is the main character. This book has a unique structure, which is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness: each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, either a guest or a staff member of the Grand Abeona, a spaceship hotel orbiting around the galaxy, their stories interweaving and intersecting. A sci-fi novel! About space! That I enjoyed! I loved this. I loved our main character who we got to use as a conduit to see and understand Earth. I absolutely loved the religion and the idiosyncrasies – God hold you down – etc. That was great. The story of Earth and what happened to it was fab, the mission of the ship. The relationship with the Captain and her love. I cried a little bit at one point when more of the story was revealed. I felt the hope and despair of every character she met. This was just such an enjoyable read. I would not in any way call this a romance novel though it is about two lovers who are separated. I would say that the ending could have come slower and / or with more compromises? I don’t know if that’s asking for too much but I do like my fantasy worlds to have a bit more cruelty (writer inflicted) than in this one? It’s fairly gentle but, I’ll take it.The stakes waiver a bit in terms of tension, especially in the first half, as because Kai isn’t really sure where she’s going, we’re also not sure where the story is going, but as her goals become more concrete, the story becomes very engaging. Hodder & Stoughton has signed two books by games journalist Grace Curtis, including her début Frontier. Rogan and her rat Garbage were my favourite characters but there were lots of great characters in this story. As she travels, she encounters a variety of people and situations. Each reacts to her differently, and thus The Stranger becomes The Courier, who temporarily teams up with… well, Garraty. I quite liked Garraty. That’s all you’ll get about him from me, so as not to sand away the shine of discovery for you. Our narrator and all the other characters all felt very genuine and unique to me so this read so well. The setting was easy to picture and imagine, the atmosphere was just cloudy enough to make it easy to fill in the details. This was just overall a well structured and thought out story. The truly wonderful part for me was the hopeful feel of this. Around the 70% there is a shift in the story and by the end I genuinely felt a hope and happiness there. It’s still a desolate earth and there were still terrible people on it but there was also hope, and that’s something rare for me in SF these days.

Frontier is set on Earth in the future. Ravaged by climate change and abandoned by most of humanity. A small group, followers of the Gaia religion remained after the great migration of humanity to live elsewhere in the Milky Way. Earth is now a post-apocalyptic landscape. One character, Kipple, is non-binary (THE FIRST!! IN ALL THESE YEARS!!). They get they/them pronouns as if it's just as natural as she/her or he/him - it's not even mentioned or pointed out once. They're just allowed to exist. Similarly, several characters are lesbian, pan, or bi, and it's not even mentioned with any label. It's completely normalised. THIS is the type of inclusion we're looking for. Floating Hotel by Grace Kurtis follows the motley crew of the space hotel Abeona. From its friendly manager Carl to its grumpy accountant Kipple to the ever-eager Reggie, all the different staff members have their own stories to tell -- stories that weave together into a tale of rebellion against the system, an encrypted message from beyond the stars, and the mystery of who the Lamplighter is, and if they can be safely extracted before the Empire gets to them. Smart, bold and so much fun . . . I'm officially a member of the Grace Curtis fan club' AMIE KAUFMANThe world was interesting, a good combination of space travel and dystopian. But I wasn’t entirely convinced of the logic of the life on Earth. There was no new technology, and everyone seemed to be living on what they grew or scavenged, but there was petrol for 21st century cars—still in use several centuries later—and fabrics for clothes, for example. Only printed books existed, even though people didn’t leave earth until the 24th century—though it was interesting to think that Alexander Dumas and Jane Austen were still read a thousand years after their books were first published. And in three centuries, no one had rebelled and started creating technology that would make life better for everyone. An outsider was needed to save them from the ill-effects of their religion. I adored the narrative structure of this novel, much to my own surprise. Having each chapter from a different POV, with little exception, sounds incredibly difficult to pull off, but Curtis does so with fluid elegance and believability. Each chapter’s narrator feels distinct, but somehow the reading experience isn’t disjointed whatsoever. I absolutely loved the experience of spending a little time in so many people’s heads: seeing characters we’d got to know through narration filtered through the eyes of others, or jumping into the POV of someone unexpected, or who you’d been hoping to inhabit. Moreover, you will wholeheartedly love everyone you spend time with, however short, in a way that is fundamental to themes of the novel. Curtis writes with such astounding empathy, and her strength of imagination goes beyond the interior lives of others…