I’ve never read a book quite like Hotel Angeline before, and I bet you haven’t either. The subtitle is “A Novel in 36 voices.” Robert Dugoni, one of my favorite authors, lives in Seattle which he described as a particular rich community for both writers and readers. In the foreword by Nancy Pearl, it is asserted, “No two people read the same book, even when it appears to be identical, with the same author, same cover, same publication date, and same pagination." She quoted Paul Auster, “The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer.” Dugoni and Jennie Shortridge were planning to attend a month-long arts festival in Seattle, and they looked for a way to make it more fun for the writers by writing a book together, six authors per day, six days in all. So, 36 authors agreed to participate. There was very limited instruction and structure for the authors, but the intent was for each author to build on what had been written before. Included in the effort was a nonprofit group founded by Dugani called Seattle7Writers.
You might imagine that there were unexpected changes and twists in this story, but the authors had a beginning, a middle and a satisfactory ending. The content was more for young adult reading that being an adult thriller. At any rate, if you’re intrigued by this effort to write a book in such a format, then have at it. It is kind of fun, but if it was not for the structure of the writing, I probably would have panned the content.
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