Hotel Flamingo

Alex Milway's Hotel Flamingo is a sunny, funny story for 7 year olds about a crumbling seaside hotel where a bear works the door and the guests are all animals.

What happens

Anna Dupont steps out of a taxi and sees the hotel she's just been left in a will. The paint is peeling, the revolving door is broken and the lobby smells of mouldy old socks (with a hint of lemon).

There are two staff left. T. Bear is the doorman, with a tiny red hat sitting between his ears. Lemmy the lemur is dozing at the front desk. Neither has been paid, and there hasn't been a guest for three years. They've stayed because it's home.

So Anna hands out the mops and dusters. What follows is a lovely run of problems and fixes. A very old tortoise comes down in the lift, having hibernated in room 202 the whole time. (She owes three years of bills, which is rather handy.) New staff arrive, including a giraffe who's good with a hammer, a hippo who sneezes at dust and a chef called Madame Le Pig who must NOT be disturbed.

Then come the guests, and that's where the fun is. No two animals want the same thing and Anna hasn't a clue what any of them need. Flamingos don't want beds. They sleep standing up and they'd like a pool, please. A party of cockroaches shares one room and it takes four of them to carry the key. Can you get a litter tray on room service? The cat in the raincoat certainly expects one.

Up on the hill sits the Glitz, the big shiny hotel that pinched everyone's guests in the first place. The Glitz turns cockroaches away. Anna's rule is that everyone is welcome.

It's a warm, busy book to read. Anna is bossy in the nicest way, and she isn't always sure of herself. At one point she flops into a chair and admits she's out of her depth. Then a guest she's been kind to offers to help. That happens a lot here!

If your reader likes animals with jobs and a plan coming together, this is an easy one to say yes to. It's the first Hotel Flamingo book.

What to read next

For another stay, try Hotel Flamingo: Carnival Caper. Anna and her staff have one week to build a carnival float, and six parrots have just asked for a pole instead of beds.