Product Description

"ONLY THE MAGNIFICENT MARTHA GRIMES COULD HAVE WRITTEN THIS BOOK. . . . BRILLIANTLY RENDERED AND SUPERBLY TEXTURED."
--Andrew Vachss

A neglected lake, covered with water lilies. A once fashionable, now faded resort. A derelict house full of secrets, uninhabited for almost half a century. The death of a twelve-year-old girl forty years in the past. And another girl who becomes obsessed with this death. With her knack for encouraging adults to reminisce, she begins to piece together puzzles from the past and present.

HOTEL PARADISE is a delicate yet disturbing view of the decisions a young girl must make on her way to becoming an adult . . . and the choices she must make between right and wrong, love and truth, life and death. With its narrative grace, compelling characters, and intricate suspense, HOTEL PARADISE is Martha Grimes at the top of her form.

"Utterly engaging."
--The Washington Post Book World

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #457534 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-28
• Released on: 1997-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 448 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780345394255
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Grimes's mystery-spinning skills take a backseat to character development and human relationships in her second, quite appealing "literary" novel (after The End of the Pier). She etches an enchanting portrait of spunky Emma Graham, the 12-year-old narrator, an incorrigibly inquisitive girl with a love of rib-sticking food. Tethered to table-waiting responsibilities in the family's frayed-at-the-edges resort hotel, Emma's only connection to youngsters her age is her consuming interest in the death by drowning of another 12-year-old girl 40 years ago: wearing a party dress, Mary-Evelyn Devereau apparently fell from a rowboat on nearby Spirit Lake in the middle of the night. Cleverly manipulating crotchety old ladies and backwoodsy old men in her pursuit of answers, Emma discovers that Mary-Evelyn's aunt Rose ran off with Ben Queen. The recent murder of their daughter, Fern Queen, and the spectral presence of a girl resembling the deceased Rose compound Emma's quest. Emma's take on the colorful characters in her small-town world?from the "bedeviled by silence" retarded Wood brothers to her great aunt Aurora, who lives on gin and fried chicken delivered by hotel dumbwaiter?makes this both a provocative study of lonely people and a delightful read. The suspense is value-added.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA?Swirling in a fog of hints and possibilities, Hotel Paradise leaves readers pondering and replaying the story over and over again. Told from the point of view of a bright 12-year-old girl and set in small-town America, it begs comparison with Olive Burns's Cold Sassy Tree (Ticknor & Fields, 1984) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. With her father dead, her older brother occupied with his own pursuits, and her mother obsessed by the managing of Hotel Paradise, the young heroine is ignored and adrift. Friendless except for the few adults in the nearby town who take an interest in her, she is nameless until the end of the book. She becomes obsessed by an event that occurred 40 years previously, the drowning of another ignored and unloved 12-year-old, Mary-Evelyn Devereau. When a Devereau relative is found murdered, the narrator sets out to connect all the clues and solve the mystery. Grimes's depiction of the main character's observations and imagination rings true. This book should appeal to YAs in its descriptions of family, adults, and life situations from a young person's point of view. The lack of a neat ending may be disappointing at first, but there is so much food for thought in this book that many teens will find it enjoyable and thought-provoking.?Carol DeAngelo, Garcia Consulting Inc., at EPA, Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Billed as a mystery, Grimes' latest has all the right elements: eerie suspense, creepy old houses where ghosts linger, murky lakes, deserted lanes, cobwebby memories of past tragedies, love, and murder. The real appeal of this superb book, though, is beyond genre. Grimes has written a quirky, bittersweet coming-of-age story that is as full of laugh-aloud humor as it is of the angst only a dreamy, lonely 12-year-old can feel when the world around her is ripe, promising, and full of tantalizing questions. Emma Graham, who works as a salad girl at the decaying resort hotel where her mother cooks, loves her mother's food almost as much as she loves investigating situations that stimulate her active imagination--like the mysterious death 40 years earlier of young Mary-Evelyn Devereau, who lived with three ugly aunts and drowned, silk-clad and sad, in nearby Spirit Lake. Emma pursues the Mary-Evelyn mystery with single-minded determination, and during the course of her investigation, finds answers to questions she didn't even know she wanted to ask. Emma is a delight and a wonder as she pursues the secrets behind Mary-Evelyn's untimely demise, and Grimes' delicately pithy perceptions of Emma's puzzling and wonderful world and the yearning, often sidesplittingly funny musings of a wise-beyond-her-years, one-of-a-kind heroine make for an enchanting read. One of the year's best! Emily Melton

Customer Reviews

I adore this book.
I must disagree with the reader who skewers this book so dreadfully (regarding a 12 year-old's vocabulary). Perhaps one of the reasons I responded so viscerally to Grimes' book is that I was a 12 year-old exactly like this narrator--bookish and full of Victorian words better written than pronounced. In "Hotel Paradise," Grimes creates a book that completely pulled me in and when it ended, I was saddened because then I had to give up the narrator's world, one I happily entered for a period of hours. I will collect Martha Grimes' books happily now (this was my first one). I most heartily recommend this book to anyone who likes books for the way they are written, and to those who can use their own imaginations when they read--after all, isn't that part of the fun of reading fiction? Grimes is no dime-store novel simpleton. Her words leap off of the page and the phrases in "Hotel Paradise" are almost edible. Buy this book in hardcover and loan it to a friend when you are finished.

Wonderful book that fiction readers may miss in mystery sect
This is the second of Martha Grimes books which depart from her usual fun English mystery format and I think it is much more successful than the first attempt. This book tells the story of a 12 year old girl living with her Mother in a run-down resort hotel who becomes obsessed with understanding why a girl her age drowned in the lake in front of their property 40 years ago. It is really a great coming of age story about a young girl who has been emotionally abandoned by her family and who needs find a place for herself and understand that sometimes one person in a family may become the family scapegoat for reasons they can't control. You will love the main character. She is spunky and intelligent and brave. This book is usually cataloged in the mystery section but is really just good fiction and shouldn't be overlooked by those people who say "I don't read mysteries".

Perfect vacation book!
I have to disagree with the negative reviews printed here. Hotel Paradise is exactly the kind of book I love to read. I took it on vacation and lounged in the sun with it for several days. As soon as it ended, I started it again. Martha Grimes obviously has a great respect for young people and their intuitive view of the adult world. I wasn't bothered at all at the lack of plot action or mystery resolution. The resolution is there for readers to decipher on their own. Can't wait to discuss this book with my Mother Daughter book group.