by Patrick Carman
ages: 9+
First sentence: “Four blocks over and twenty-one blocks down from the Whippet Hotel, there was a crumbling neighborhood of mostly empty buildings.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Floors

It seems, to me at least, that Merganzer Whippet was not cut out to be a businessman. And that if he’s having 12 year old boys run his hotel for him, he really needs to have something checked. Granted, that hotel is a whimsical, fabulous place, but still.  Merganzer owes $7million in back taxes (the man needs an accountant!), and since his nemesis, Ms. Sparks, is still out there, desiring to turn the hotel into something, well, respectable and income-generating, Merganzer needs Leo and Remi to go down into the depths of the hotel (there are three sub-floors) to get what he needs in order to salvage the hotel.

Reading this, I was just “meh” about it. Sure,  it was fun and whimsical, but as I pointed out in my review for the first one: this really didn’t need to be written. The “universe” that Carman has created doesn’t really support extended stories, and while I didn’t mind Leo and Remi’s adventure the first time, it was kind of a stretch for me to care about them this time around.

Writing this up, I found myself asking questions like: Why does the kid of color have to be the pudgy one? How come the big baddie is a woman? Are boys the sole proprietors of whimsicalness? Sure, this is meant to be a book for boys, but still.  It seems that Carman has just come up with a formula, and is just plugging in the numbers, not really taking the time to develop characters or their motivations, but rather just going from cool room to cool room just because it sounded, well, cool.

And, while I think kids would like this, I would also like to think that maybe we can expect more from them and from the authors writing for this age group.

Is that too much to ask?