Hotel World (Smith) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
In this voice from beyond the grave Ali Smith has created the perfect literary ghost...imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality...and her beautiful, vivid descriptions are reinforced by a sharp, unsentimental tongue.
Times (London)


Where British reviewers see ambition, subtlety and wild imagination, all I can detect are leaden whimsy and mechanistic storytelling. Hotel World turns out to be a thin piece of work, one that fails to deliver on the promise implicit in its title—for, rather than explore the entire world of a hotel, with its broad array of guests, staff and casual visitors, Smith concentrates on a handful of characters who seem hostile to the very notion of professional hospitality.
Michael Upchurch - New York Times


To her considerable credit as a writer, Smith manages to have her characters approach these grim subjects in moods of humor and unselfconscious bumbling, which makes Hotel World a greatly appealing read.
Chris Lehmann - Washington Post


The heart of Scottish writer Ali Smith may belong to good old-fashioned metaphysics—to truth and beauty and love beyond the grave—but her stylistic sensibility owes its punch to the Modernists. She's street-savy and poignant at once, with a brutal sense of irony and a wonderful feel for literary economy. There's a kind of stainless-steel clarity at the center of her fiction.
Boston Globe


Hotel World is compelling...precisely because it suggests shifting yet coherent perspectives rather than simplifying lives into rigid, inert realities. Most impressively, Smith has mastered sophisticated literary techniques, which never intrude or bog down a delectable narrative of human perception and rumination. Apart from establishing Ali Smith as a novelist with the skills of a Martin Amis and Samuel Beckett combined, Hotel World is a damn good read
San Francisco Chronicle


[In] Smith's hands, this slender plot serves as an excuse for a delightfully inventive, exuberant, fierce novel of which the real star is not the dead Sara, or any of the living characters, but the author's vivid, fluent, highly readable prose. Hotel World was a well-deserved finalist last year for two prestigious British prizes: the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.... I can't begin to paraphrase all that this dazzling book conveys about humanity and mortality.
Margot Livesey - Newsday


Featured are five women whose lives (and a death) overlap at the Global Hotel, a generic establishment in an unnamed city in England.... Smith's narrative style varies with each character and is generally exciting and quite successful, although some readers will find the acrobatics tiring. The connections she makes between the characters across class lines and even across the line between life and death are driven home in a beautifully lyrical coda.
Publishers Weekly


A heartfelt and introspective ghost story, Hotel World begins at the end and works backward and then meanders some in between.... [C]haracters come together in a tender, moving story of innocence, love, and kindness. Highly recommended. —Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst., Harrisburg, PA
Library Journal


A...verbally high-speed tale of a girl's death that may touch some but will seem mainly airy to others..... The pieces do finally come together, yet all remains oddly mechanical, no matter how many words and pages accumulate, and accumulate, and accumulate. One feels as though Smith were taking as long as possible on as little as possible to make things seem as important as possible.
Kirkus Reviews