Publishers Weekly
05/30/2022
Jacobs (The Worst Kind of Want) returns with an amusing if over-the-top satire of the überwealthy. After a chance meeting at a hospitality conference, small-town newlyweds Keith and Kit Collins befriend the tony Richard and Ilka Beaumont, who invite the couple to honeymoon at their renowned Beverly Hills establishment, the Pink Hotel. Once Keith and Kit check in, Keith, who works as the general manager of his uncle’s restaurant and hotel, is enamored of the elite scene and agrees to help Richard attend to guests in hopes of securing a job offer, leaving Kit to spend time with a hard-partying young socialite who’s also staying at the hotel. Complications arise when Keith develops a crush on Richard’s mistress, Coco, whose cousin Sean (a construction worker helping with an expansion at the hotel) takes a liking to Kit after she faints from heatstroke and lands in his arms. Then things go off the rails as encroaching wildfires and rolling blackouts stir up angry mobs outside the hotel gates, while, inside, a guest’s exotic cats go on the attack, shots ring out, and tensions boil over. The chaotic climax is something to behold, but thinly drawn characters water down the satire’s potency, and the class commentary is a bit predictable. Readers who can look past a few wobbles will be easily carried along by the rollicking madcap sensibility. (July)
From the Publisher
An Esquire Best Book of 2022
"The perfect book to recommend to all your friends in hospitality! And also just the perfect book. I tore through this one like a California wildfire—an appropriate comparison, given the novel’s setting in a high-end hotel beset by fires all around."
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
"Heady and dark and dangerous, The Pink Hotel is an intoxicating binge of a book. Liska Jacobs's stunning indictment of a society teetering toward apocalypse is one you won’t easily forget.”
—Janelle Brown, author of Pretty Things
"The Pink Hotel is a terrifying, tremulous hallway of mirrors, a personal and public apocalypse story of vast proportions and singular fears, a portrait of lush disorder by Liska Jacobs."
—Susan Straight, author of Mecca
"Liska Jacobs has written a lush, harrowing study of the human animal, the hyper-rich and the strivers who serve them, made grotesque and degraded by the effects of extreme, unconscionable wealth. Intense and violent and chokingly atmospheric, an unforgettable addition to the literature of Los Angeles."
—Steph Cha, author of Your House Will Pay
"Irresistible and audacious, The Pink Hotel sucked me into its microcosm of glittering menace and wouldn’t let go until the whole thing burned to the ground."
—Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth
"A sexy, terrifying, and tremendously fun novel. Liska Jacobs has an extraordinary mind—her writing leaps from darkly claustrophobic to wildly expansive. The Pink Hotel is impossible to put down; you will carry it everywhere you go."
—Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair
"Part social satire and part disaster novel, The Pink Hotel is riotous in every sense of the word. What begins as a juicy look behind the scenes at L.A.’s swankiest hotel quickly turns into a profound study of how class and privilege shape our reactions to catastrophe. This scathing and surreal novel is Liska Jacob’s best yet, and it kept me hooked all the way to the brutal, unforgettable end."
—Sara Sligar, author of Take Me Apart
"Like a deranged American version of Parasite, Liska Jacobs’s The Pink Hotel takes aim at American class disparity and strikes dead center. Jacobs’s unerringly precise eye, her deadpan wit, and above all her ferocity—the unflagging energy and vitality of her writing itself—make this book a marvel from start to finish."
—Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine
Kirkus Reviews
2022-04-27
Two newlyweds honeymoon in a Los Angeles hotel for the uber-wealthy while fires ravage the city.
When Kit and Keith Collins arrive at the luxurious Pink Hotel, Kit has no idea their stay is doubling as an extended job interview. Although the couple has met success—the restaurant at which they both work, he as general manager and she as a waitress, has recently earned a Michelin star—it’s still in middle-of-nowhere Boonville, and Keith has greater ambitions. Kit feels sidelined and disillusioned, spending her days drinking with the ruthlessly extroverted Marguerite instead of with her new husband. Keith, who “liked watching Kit transform from this unsure girl, an orphan really, to someone whose dreams matched his own,” grows increasingly frustrated that she isn’t enthused by this opportunity. “Had she expected they’d live in Boonville forever?” Meanwhile, fires destroy thousands of homes, and working-class people are rioting in the streets. A slew of bored billionaires flock to the hotel “for comfort,” and suddenly the hotel is understaffed and needs Keith to help—uncompensated, of course, except for the flimsy promise of future employment. Tension mounts, Veuve Clicquot and Dom Pérignon flow, and the hotel descends into chaos. “The ennui of the elite wasn’t some abstract concept,” Jacobs writes. “Their boredom can shift landscapes, collapse entire economies.” At a sentence level, the novel sings. The prose is pithy and precise, and one imagines Jacobs can summon any image with unsettling swiftness. The social commentary that underpins the story, however, is a little obvious. Out-of-touch billionaires are low-hanging fruit as far as social satire goes, and one wishes that Jacobs used her powers to nudge the story into more fruitful and nuanced territory.
A sharply written satire with somewhat heavy-handed social commentary.
