Book No. 41 of 2025
After more than a month of starting books and not finishing any of them, and also starting a side project of reading one chapter of Les Misérables a day and blogging about it, I finally read and finished a book. My child self, who could inhale half a dozen books in a day, would be horrified.
I really, really loved Lavery’s Women’s Hotel (Book No. 5 of this year) and was thrilled that he wrote a little novella of additional vignettes featuring its characters around the holidays. While the title and cover are obviously Christmas-themed, the stories themselves are largely not overtly holiday-ish, and this would be a delightful read any time of year.
I absolutely adore Lavery’s ability to describe a character and their actions in ways that are both devastating and quietly hilarious, which makes this book an absolute delight from start to finish—Lavery could write a book in which absolutely nothing happens at all and I would read it. There is something about life at the Biedermeier Hotel that seems both mildly pathetic and incredibly, quaintly charming, particularly with the various characters’ approaches to the small legalities of day-to-day life.