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The Pink Hotel FAMILY relationships are the primal mystery of literature, and for a young novelist they offer fertile ground as a way of scrutinising the adult world. The Pink Hotel is about a teenager who flies from London to Los Angeles to discover more about her biological mother, Lily, who has died young. Lily’s room in the hotel yields little beyond the suitcase of old clothes and photographs. The two women could not be more different: one is dark, the other fair, one an ex-model-turned nurse, the other a bookish ex-grammar-school girl, good at being overlooked. Inevitably, we discover that both women have led troubled lives, so that the theft of Lily’s suitcase is part of a pattern. It becomes clear that our narrator’s journey is as much flight as quest. She seems a little too well educated for the straitened North London life she describes, but as a sensitively-drawn portrait of a troubled young woman, she is convincing. As she hangs around seedy Los Angeles bars, the plot builds up an elegant mystery. Why does Lily’s husband want the suitcase back so badly? What was Lily really like? This touching, convoluted love-story is shot through with a distinctive talent, but it is the second novel of a writer still teetering on the edge of the adult world. Next time, readers will hope she is fully engaged with it. — The Independent
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