The hero of this story, and of the hotel, is Leo, a young boy who lives with his dad at the Whippet Hotel. Leo's dad is the hotel fix-it-man and right now he and his son are totally run off their feet as everything in the hotel seems to be breaking down. The Whippet Hotel is the creation of the eccentric and reclusive Merganzer D Whippet but he has disappeared. He has been gone for one hundred days.
If I list some of the crazy aspects of this hotel it might give you a small insight into the mayhem contained in this intriguing book.
A family of ducks live on the hotel roof. Each day they need to be brought down to street level in a special duck elevator.
"The duck elevator was a contraption very much like an ordinary elevator, only shorter, narrower, shower and bursting with the aroma of wet feathers."
On the third floor there is a room that is actually designed to be a giant pinball machine.
"The slanted floor was covered with lights and arrows and circled numbers, just like a real pinball machine. At the far end of the room was a hole as big as a tyre, which had a flipper on each side."
On an upper floor where things are even crazier there is the Flying Farm Room. This room is filled with goats and sheep and even a bull but actually they are holograms.
Interspersed between chapters, where Leo and his friends explore the hotel and follow an intriguing set of clues and instructions, we read about Merganzer Whippet and the plan by someone unknown to acquire this valuable hotel for an especially low price as it seems to be falling into ruin.
You might like to explore the web site for this book which includes videos, picture and an author Q&A. I have reviewed another book by Patrick Carman - Skeleton Creek. It seems there might even be a movie of this amazing book one day. You can read a little more of the plot here. I have included an alternate cover. Floors is the first book in a trilogy - we urgently need to add the other two tiles to our library collection.
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