5

Wow! I was not expecting this book to be so rich in detail, context, theme and character development. On one level it's just a very descriptive outline of 5 days in the life of a luxury hotel in New Orleans in the early 1960s. Hotel also takes a critical stance in the civil rights issues of the era. Through carefully crafted characters, it comes out pro-desegregation but does it without wielding a heavy hand. Then at the individual characters and vignettes, the book is about karma and how little decissions can add up to either good things happening or extremely bad things happening.