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Cosmic Hotel
Sandeep Sanghavi, the mixed-race son of an Indian businesswoman and a famous American astronomer lives a nomadic albeit mundane life traveling the country with his mother's hotel consulting firm. His life becomes more interesting when various lost objects suddenly begin to reappear. Then a stranger calls and claims responsibility for the returned objects in exchange for an introduction to Sandeep’s astronomer father, the rebellious and eccentric Van Ray, who has no phone, email or qualms about having abandoned his son twenty years ago.
Van Ray shows up broke with his pregnant ex-wife astronaut in tow, claiming to have discovered a big secret that will change their lives forever; a new discovery guaranteed to change him from “science famous” to “famous famous.”
With his family together for the first time in years, Sandeep must juggle his father’s scientific search, his mother’s failing business and the tension of having family all together for the first time in decades.
Van Ray shows up broke with his pregnant ex-wife astronaut in tow, claiming to have discovered a big secret that will change their lives forever; a new discovery guaranteed to change him from “science famous” to “famous famous.”
With his family together for the first time in years, Sandeep must juggle his father’s scientific search, his mother’s failing business and the tension of having family all together for the first time in decades.
- GenresFictionScience Fiction
272 pages, Paperback
First published May 10, 2016
7 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 20, 2016
Loved this! Full review on my booktube channel soon.
July 20, 2016
A reminder: I rate a book only as to how much I enjoyed it.
I'm not sure what it all meant in the end,
but I enjoyed the getting there very much.
I'm not sure what it all meant in the end,
but I enjoyed the getting there very much.
May 5, 2018
Really enjoyed this.....somewhere between Tom Robbins, Douglas Adams and Zen tracts..........
The plot line zips around, but the Great Cosmic Question pops up and offers many answers.
The plot line zips around, but the Great Cosmic Question pops up and offers many answers.
Want to read
October 31, 2018This is what being is: an existence, a created crater. We all just simply go away and our gravity disappears.
August 1, 2020
Minor, vague spoilers below.
I bought this book because I like stories about aliens and dysfunctional families, and also because I felt obligated to buy it -- once upon a time, I was Russ Franklin's student. Surprisingly, an autographed copy arrived in the mail. Nothing like a little cosmic randomness before reading a story about cosmic randomness.
We meet astronomer Van Raye, rock star scientist and absent father of protagonist Sandeep Sanghavi. Van Raye makes his living by writing popular books and appearing on science TV shows, but he is no Michio Kaku or Carl Sagan. He hops from woman to woman and country to country, never staying in one place or with one partner. He doesn't own a phone. When we first see Van Raye, he is past his prime and living on a university campus under threat of eviction, and he is desperate for his big break. The thing that will make him not just science famous but famous famous.
But Sandeep has a distant relationship with his father. He sends him money to impress him, but only his mother, Elizabeth, ever gives him any attention. He and Elizabeth travel around the country to shut down failing hotels, and they are very good at it. One hotel employee is surprised when Sandeep identifies himself as a Sanghavi, because he didn't think the Sanghavis were real. They are grim reapers of hospitality. Sandeep wants them to open their own hotel, run their own operation, but Elizabeth disagrees. So they go on with their jobs, handing out pink slips and severance packages to strangers and watching old buildings get demolished.
Then Sandeep gets a call. It's Van Raye. He's found his big break.
For a novel with so many secrets to reveal, Cosmic Hotel is tight-lipped. We hear from Ursula, Sandeep's second cousin, about a shadowy program called Flight 000, or simply "triple-zero," whose passengers signed lifetime NDAs and agreed never to speak about what happened. But what went down on triple-zero remains a mystery to the end. We don't know if anything weird happened. We don't learn much about the book's alien until the very end -- okay, it's barely a spoiler, but this book has an alien -- and for the first couple hundred pages, we're totally in the dark about it. What it is, what it wants, where it's from. All we know is that it likes to send cheeky text messages with lots of emoji. It's an effective gag, though: a quirky E.T. who texts like they're in the 7th grade and who always knows more than they let on.
Russ Franklin's debut novel is literary fiction with a thin glaze of sci-fi on top. Sandeep spends many pages talking about his childhood in northern Florida, land of alligators and ATVs, and his relationship with the rest of his family. Though Franklin writes beautifully and convincingly, I found myself searching for the sci-fi. I scoured the paragraphs for something alien and weird and interstellar, and all I found -- up until the last 20 pages or so -- was family issues, interpersonal struggles, and sexual confusion. But this doesn't make Cosmic Hotel bad, and it doesn't make it misleading. It means that Franklin has written a unique story. It refuses to be shoved into one category or another. Once I dropped my expectations of a grand story of First Contact and extraterrestrial magic, I became engrossed in Sandeep Sanghavi's life. I enjoyed his conversations with Ursula the most, partly because of her claims of alien abduction and partly because they had enough sexual tension to snap a steel cable. (Yes, sexual tension with his second cousin. Roll Tide.)
Some parts of this book frustrated me, though. Sandeep takes a flippant approach to the alien, even after he learns that it's real. He prioritizes his interpersonal struggles over everything else, and I found his dismissive reaction to the alien a little disappointing. This is literary fiction, not pure sci-fi space opera, so I get the focus on character building. But the characters seemed to resist any forward movement in the story. I'm not as patient a reader as I'd like to be, but honestly, reading this book sometimes felt like pulling teeth. Maybe it says more about me than about the story. Franklin went to great pains to make his characters convincing and three-dimensional, and it shows, but I guess I just have a short attention span. With everything Franklin reveals about the alien toward the end of the book, it seemed like he could've sprinkled more information throughout the story to keep us hooked and following the breadcrumbs.
Since the book focuses on Sandeep's relationships with others, it's worth talking about his relationships with women. He has one night stands almost as often as his scientist womanizer father. Nearly every meeting with a woman of similar age ends in bed. His sexual encounters all serve a storytelling purpose, revealing new information or exploring another facet of Sandeep's character, but I wish Sandeep could've had an important conversation with a woman without hearing the "Sanctus bells of an erection," as Franklin often puts it. Not to be a prude, but I'm skeptical of how necessary all the sex was. The tricky thing is, though, sex isn't per se bad as a storytelling device; it brings out our rawest feelings, lays bare our insecurities and vulnerabilities. Sandeep's sexual urges shed light on his relationship with his Van Raye, a man he both admires and dislikes, and how Van Raye's actions echo across generations. And Sandeep's fixation on Ursula drives the plot forward for much of the book's second half. But the way he pursues sex -- ignoring her concerns, brushing her aside when she tries to talk about something serious, then climbing into bed -- left a slightly bad taste in my mouth. I wondered if Sandeep's sexual frustration and emotional confusion could've been explored in other ways. It didn't ruin the story, not at all, because none of it came across as totally gratuitous, and Franklin has such gorgeous writing that these problems didn't affect my experience much. I don't know.
Can anyone explain what makes a story work? I can point to Sandeep's depth and realness as a character, or Elizabeth's sternness and tough love, or Van Raye's total shallowness, or Ursula's mysterious stories and paranoia and claims of alien abduction, but that doesn't fully explain what makes it tick. Maybe it's Cosmic Hotel's refusal to fit solely into sci-fi or into literary fiction, falling into some Goldilocks zone between the two, or the way it uses the supernatural as a complement to the plain old natural. Some parts were more compelling than others, sure -- but this story knows exactly what it is. It's ambitious. Russ Franklin tries to weave so much into this book, from E.T. to God to parenthood to government experiments to existential dread, stuff that would've been pretentious and silly coming from a lesser writer. But this book pulls it off. It gets right what most new writers get wrong. It's far from perfect, but the important stuff -- the meat of the story -- is all there.
An exciting debut. I'm biased, but Russ is a writer to watch.
I bought this book because I like stories about aliens and dysfunctional families, and also because I felt obligated to buy it -- once upon a time, I was Russ Franklin's student. Surprisingly, an autographed copy arrived in the mail. Nothing like a little cosmic randomness before reading a story about cosmic randomness.
We meet astronomer Van Raye, rock star scientist and absent father of protagonist Sandeep Sanghavi. Van Raye makes his living by writing popular books and appearing on science TV shows, but he is no Michio Kaku or Carl Sagan. He hops from woman to woman and country to country, never staying in one place or with one partner. He doesn't own a phone. When we first see Van Raye, he is past his prime and living on a university campus under threat of eviction, and he is desperate for his big break. The thing that will make him not just science famous but famous famous.
But Sandeep has a distant relationship with his father. He sends him money to impress him, but only his mother, Elizabeth, ever gives him any attention. He and Elizabeth travel around the country to shut down failing hotels, and they are very good at it. One hotel employee is surprised when Sandeep identifies himself as a Sanghavi, because he didn't think the Sanghavis were real. They are grim reapers of hospitality. Sandeep wants them to open their own hotel, run their own operation, but Elizabeth disagrees. So they go on with their jobs, handing out pink slips and severance packages to strangers and watching old buildings get demolished.
Then Sandeep gets a call. It's Van Raye. He's found his big break.
For a novel with so many secrets to reveal, Cosmic Hotel is tight-lipped. We hear from Ursula, Sandeep's second cousin, about a shadowy program called Flight 000, or simply "triple-zero," whose passengers signed lifetime NDAs and agreed never to speak about what happened. But what went down on triple-zero remains a mystery to the end. We don't know if anything weird happened. We don't learn much about the book's alien until the very end -- okay, it's barely a spoiler, but this book has an alien -- and for the first couple hundred pages, we're totally in the dark about it. What it is, what it wants, where it's from. All we know is that it likes to send cheeky text messages with lots of emoji. It's an effective gag, though: a quirky E.T. who texts like they're in the 7th grade and who always knows more than they let on.
Russ Franklin's debut novel is literary fiction with a thin glaze of sci-fi on top. Sandeep spends many pages talking about his childhood in northern Florida, land of alligators and ATVs, and his relationship with the rest of his family. Though Franklin writes beautifully and convincingly, I found myself searching for the sci-fi. I scoured the paragraphs for something alien and weird and interstellar, and all I found -- up until the last 20 pages or so -- was family issues, interpersonal struggles, and sexual confusion. But this doesn't make Cosmic Hotel bad, and it doesn't make it misleading. It means that Franklin has written a unique story. It refuses to be shoved into one category or another. Once I dropped my expectations of a grand story of First Contact and extraterrestrial magic, I became engrossed in Sandeep Sanghavi's life. I enjoyed his conversations with Ursula the most, partly because of her claims of alien abduction and partly because they had enough sexual tension to snap a steel cable. (Yes, sexual tension with his second cousin. Roll Tide.)
Some parts of this book frustrated me, though. Sandeep takes a flippant approach to the alien, even after he learns that it's real. He prioritizes his interpersonal struggles over everything else, and I found his dismissive reaction to the alien a little disappointing. This is literary fiction, not pure sci-fi space opera, so I get the focus on character building. But the characters seemed to resist any forward movement in the story. I'm not as patient a reader as I'd like to be, but honestly, reading this book sometimes felt like pulling teeth. Maybe it says more about me than about the story. Franklin went to great pains to make his characters convincing and three-dimensional, and it shows, but I guess I just have a short attention span. With everything Franklin reveals about the alien toward the end of the book, it seemed like he could've sprinkled more information throughout the story to keep us hooked and following the breadcrumbs.
Since the book focuses on Sandeep's relationships with others, it's worth talking about his relationships with women. He has one night stands almost as often as his scientist womanizer father. Nearly every meeting with a woman of similar age ends in bed. His sexual encounters all serve a storytelling purpose, revealing new information or exploring another facet of Sandeep's character, but I wish Sandeep could've had an important conversation with a woman without hearing the "Sanctus bells of an erection," as Franklin often puts it. Not to be a prude, but I'm skeptical of how necessary all the sex was. The tricky thing is, though, sex isn't per se bad as a storytelling device; it brings out our rawest feelings, lays bare our insecurities and vulnerabilities. Sandeep's sexual urges shed light on his relationship with his Van Raye, a man he both admires and dislikes, and how Van Raye's actions echo across generations. And Sandeep's fixation on Ursula drives the plot forward for much of the book's second half. But the way he pursues sex -- ignoring her concerns, brushing her aside when she tries to talk about something serious, then climbing into bed -- left a slightly bad taste in my mouth. I wondered if Sandeep's sexual frustration and emotional confusion could've been explored in other ways. It didn't ruin the story, not at all, because none of it came across as totally gratuitous, and Franklin has such gorgeous writing that these problems didn't affect my experience much. I don't know.
Can anyone explain what makes a story work? I can point to Sandeep's depth and realness as a character, or Elizabeth's sternness and tough love, or Van Raye's total shallowness, or Ursula's mysterious stories and paranoia and claims of alien abduction, but that doesn't fully explain what makes it tick. Maybe it's Cosmic Hotel's refusal to fit solely into sci-fi or into literary fiction, falling into some Goldilocks zone between the two, or the way it uses the supernatural as a complement to the plain old natural. Some parts were more compelling than others, sure -- but this story knows exactly what it is. It's ambitious. Russ Franklin tries to weave so much into this book, from E.T. to God to parenthood to government experiments to existential dread, stuff that would've been pretentious and silly coming from a lesser writer. But this book pulls it off. It gets right what most new writers get wrong. It's far from perfect, but the important stuff -- the meat of the story -- is all there.
An exciting debut. I'm biased, but Russ is a writer to watch.
January 25, 2017
This is a really nifty cosmic-comic relief story. Franklin has dreamed up some interesting characters, added a little cosmic chili, stirred in a dose of very believably-unbelievable events and produced an interesting read. I liked his main characters (the two most seen--the mom and the son) and a curious collection of extras. And in the end Franklin asks some basic questions about belief and observes some strange goings on in our world.
December 31, 2016
Phantasmagoric
Human. So very truly human. An extended family remembering their past and sharing the present while creating a future ever so tranquil. I've never read anything quite like it. I felt enveloped within the sphere of their love. Franklin spins a reality that could never be yet seems so plausible. Drink this sweet humour.
Human. So very truly human. An extended family remembering their past and sharing the present while creating a future ever so tranquil. I've never read anything quite like it. I felt enveloped within the sphere of their love. Franklin spins a reality that could never be yet seems so plausible. Drink this sweet humour.
February 27, 2017
Weirdly wonderful
April 12, 2024
Didn't work for me.
It's much more a dysfunctional-family novel than it is SF.
And I don't care for d-f novels.
And maybe it's closer to magic realism than SF.
The protagonist is a nebbish. His mother's a cardboard figure, a walking "how-to-succeed" book.
Randolph is just frustrating, and so is Schlub's refusal to try to find out what Randolph is.
"Van Raye" is even worse. If I want my characters to be frustrating, I'll read Connie Willis.
When I stopped halfway, I had decided that Randolph is a cosmic jerkwad and I don't want to meet him.
Your mileage may vary. If you like the kind of stuff that I describe above, it's better written here than other places I've seen it.
It's much more a dysfunctional-family novel than it is SF.
And I don't care for d-f novels.
And maybe it's closer to magic realism than SF.
The protagonist is a nebbish. His mother's a cardboard figure, a walking "how-to-succeed" book.
Randolph is just frustrating, and so is Schlub's refusal to try to find out what Randolph is.
"Van Raye" is even worse. If I want my characters to be frustrating, I'll read Connie Willis.
When I stopped halfway, I had decided that Randolph is a cosmic jerkwad and I don't want to meet him.
Your mileage may vary. If you like the kind of stuff that I describe above, it's better written here than other places I've seen it.
May 12, 2016
Sandeep and Elizabeth Sanghavi, a mother/son hotel consulting team travel the country downsizing and closing hotels and motels for groups of investors. Randall, a mysterious contact, sends text messages to Sandeep, urging him to put Randall in touch with Van Raye, Sandeep’s father, a world renowned astronomer who has abandoned his family until times he needs money. Van Raye claims he has discovered proof of alien existence on another planet but is awaiting confirmation of the discovery before he announces it to the world. He’s also trying to contrive a way to send a message to the alien civilization before governments and institutions take over his discovery.
Mixing into the story are Dubourg, a cousin who’s become a priest and whose calling is to carry with him at all times a mysterious briefcase belonging to the Church; Ursula, an airline pilot who’s a distant relative and whom Sandeep considers convincing himself he should marry; and Ruth, another former wife of Van Raye, an astronaut who becomes pregnant while in space, then abandons the space station. Somewhere along the way a strange dog enters the story too.
Sandeep strives to figure out if Randall is actually controlling parts of his life (lost luggage, chance encounters, time itself) in his effort to meet with Van Raye, why such a meeting is so important, why he’s still in the hotel business, whether he should pursue Ursula, and what’s going on with his life. In the end, of course, as we hoped, but not necessarily in the ways we’d expected, things are resolved.
The plot line rather defies easy summation (probably a good thing, I’d say) which may be why I can’t seem to put together smooth, coherent thoughts about this book. Now and then I was reminded of early Vonnegut, of Richard Brautigan, of Sherman Alexie, of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate) – again, good things. Cosmic Hotel is an enticing, humorous, touching story. At the end I found I cared about the characters much more deeply than I thought I would when I began the story. Good things all around for Russ Franklin and for Cosmic Hotel. Despite my fumbling, give it a try.
>>Support independent bookstores by buying real books from real stores where you can talk with real booksellers.<<
Mixing into the story are Dubourg, a cousin who’s become a priest and whose calling is to carry with him at all times a mysterious briefcase belonging to the Church; Ursula, an airline pilot who’s a distant relative and whom Sandeep considers convincing himself he should marry; and Ruth, another former wife of Van Raye, an astronaut who becomes pregnant while in space, then abandons the space station. Somewhere along the way a strange dog enters the story too.
Sandeep strives to figure out if Randall is actually controlling parts of his life (lost luggage, chance encounters, time itself) in his effort to meet with Van Raye, why such a meeting is so important, why he’s still in the hotel business, whether he should pursue Ursula, and what’s going on with his life. In the end, of course, as we hoped, but not necessarily in the ways we’d expected, things are resolved.
The plot line rather defies easy summation (probably a good thing, I’d say) which may be why I can’t seem to put together smooth, coherent thoughts about this book. Now and then I was reminded of early Vonnegut, of Richard Brautigan, of Sherman Alexie, of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate) – again, good things. Cosmic Hotel is an enticing, humorous, touching story. At the end I found I cared about the characters much more deeply than I thought I would when I began the story. Good things all around for Russ Franklin and for Cosmic Hotel. Despite my fumbling, give it a try.
>>Support independent bookstores by buying real books from real stores where you can talk with real booksellers.<<
July 22, 2025
While the book felt like it was off to a slow start (I like to be invested pretty quickly) it picked up and I really enjoyed it overall. The characters were unique and the relationships explored through the book were well written. Everything felt earned and in the end I felt like all of the pieces or loose bits of information wove their way back into the story in a perfect way. It’s a story unlike any I’ve read before and I appreciate that!
May 6, 2016
Loved this. Quirky story that goes to unexpected places with ease.
gave-up-reading
June 2, 2017I actually made it half way through this book, but I just couldn't take it anymore.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews