The Hotel Alleluia
Lucinda Roy
Harper Collins
Published: January 2000
ISBN: 0060193956
Reviewed by Stephanie
The Hotel Alleluia is the second novel by Lucinda Roy, who is also a prize winning poet and Professor in English. This novel is an amazing work of art; instead of paint on a canvas, there are words on the pages.
Ursuline Shebar and Joan Plum are related. More specifically they are half-sisters. They are as different as two family members can be. Ursuline is Black and Joan is White and both have the same mother. Joan, a computer programmer, decides to leave Raleigh, North Carolina to go to West Africa and bring her sister, Ursuline, a nun, back to the United States. As the sisters are on the runway on the last plane out of the city, Joan is ordered off the plane and detained because of a visa violation, or so she's told.
Roy gives readers a multicultural and multiracial cast of characters while spanning the across the globe. Joining Ursuline and Joan are: Gordan Delacriox, an African American peace core volunteer, as well as Joan's ex-boyfriend; Jeremy Scott, a White Englishman from Bath, London; Monday Kaia, a teenaged prostitute and "lover" of Jeremy; and Prince Sisay, a Temme's country boy, who gladly becomes a gofer because it beats being on the streets literally starving and homeless.
There's a lot going on in this story but Roy juggles the main characters, secondary characters, and subplots expertly. Roy is highly commended for effortlessly handling the delicate issue of race as well as the other major issue of sisterhood, in both the broadest and narrowest sense. She also switches from first to third person, and back, with comfortable ease. Added to this lovely portrait are adequate amounts of intrigue, suspense and humor.
