A review by erboe501
Hotel World by Ali Smith

5.0

Wow. Ali Smith is one sharp writer. Her writing is so tight, every word of a section bounces off the words of the other sections. The first section will start out a little confusing, but the style (my favorite aspect of the book) and the tragedy of a girl's fatal fall down a broken dumbwaiter will soon draw you in. Each section of the text has a unique voice, and Smith makes the characters so real that you want to cry over some characters and slap some sympathy into others. I actually did cry in the section Future in the Past, narrated by the dead girl's sister. The way she copes with the grief of her sister's death spoke to a truth in all of us about how we never want to let go of a dead loved one, even if that means collecting dust in a bedroom in the hopes that some of the loved one's dead skin cells remain. The genius of Hotel World is its revelation that everyone is connected, by a hair or a thread, to everyone else in his or her life. Everything, especially in Smith's text, has meaning.