Review: At The Grand Glacier Hotel
Gaby Meares
I must admit that I purchased this book because 1) the cover is gorgeous and 2) it’s set in the beautiful South Island of New Zealand.
It started promisingly, with the narrator, Libby and her husband Curtis escaping for a holiday to the majestic Grand Glacier Hotel, located near the rapidly retreating Franz Josef glacier. Circumstances leave Libby alone in the hotel, and extreme weather cuts off access.
Libby is recovering from cancer that has rendered her leg badly damaged by surgery and radiation. Everything she does is a struggle, and she must calculate every movement to ensure that she doesn’t fall. This dominates the book. This a a book about a woman recovering from cancer. Unfortunately, her time spent with the other hotel guests doesn’t seem to effect her greatly - where is the development of the character; the arc of her self-discovery while isolated in this grand hotel? She seems to be the same at the end of the book as she is at the beginning. She is supposed to be 52 years old, and describes herself as if she were 72 years old. I appreciate the disability makes her feel older, but it makes for rather depressing reading.
The descriptions of the landscape are sublime. You can feel the damp, dripping natural environment. For this alone, I gave my three stars.
The plot is plodding and has no resolution. All in all, I found this book disappointing. Perhaps if the author had written a memoir about her own recovery from a similar cancer, it could have been a more personal, and thus engaging, journey.