Review: Women's Hotel

Women's Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I admit that I doubt if I am the proper audience for this novel. I acknowledge that I have never read anything by this author, so I really had no great expectations. However, based on the recap, I expected something a little different from what I got. This book was compared to Lessons in Chemistry, and I can wholeheartedly say that that is a bunch of bull poop.

This heavy-handed novel does not have me living these females' lives. I fully expected some true history based on real women's hotels with a lot of fiction mixed in. Instead, I got endless paragraphs of repetitive drivel that did nothing but ramble. There is nothing cohesive about this novel.

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SYNOPSIS: "From the New York Times bestselling author and advice columnist, a poignant and funny debut novel about the residents of a women’s hotel in 1960s New York City.

The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.

The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they’d better make the most of it while it lasts.

As trenchant as the novels of Dawn Powell and Rona Jaffe and as immersive as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Lessons in Chemistry, Women’s Hotel is a modern classic—and it is very, very funny."