Tilly was a bright, outgoing little girl who liked playing with ghosts and matches. She loved fizzy drinks, swear words, fish fingers and Catholic churches, but most of all she loved living in Brighton in Queenie Malone's magnificent Paradise Hotel with its endearing and loving family of misfits. But Tilly's childhood was shattered when her mother sent her away from the only home she'd ever loved to boarding school with little explanation and no warning.

Now an adult, Tilda has grown into an independent woman still damaged by her mother's unaccountable cruelty. Wary of people, her only friend is her dog, Eli. But when her mother dies, Tilda returns to Brighton and with the help of her beloved Queenie sets about unravelling the mystery of her exile from The Paradise Hotel, only to discover that her mother was not the woman she thought she knew at all ...

Whoa! What a first sentence!!
on my BC-Shelf I've written a quote by Faulkner: "You have got to write the first sentence of a story so that whoever reads it will want to read the second one" - and after this opening I definitely wanted to read the second!

I loved this book! I love Tilly's story and Tilda's, I love the quirkiness, Eli, the humour, the Paradise Hotel, the sad parts about Stevie and Tilly's Mum, Tilly's way to say the "adult" words as she understands them (Bermondsey), Daniel and Joseph Geronimo (though I have to admit I am a bit at a loss about him.. for a long time I thought he was one of the dead people, too), the "fantastic" parts, how the story slowly unravels...
In fact I have to admit to reading it again because there is so much hidden in just one sentence and some things became clear at the end and now I am looking them up when they happened..

The one thing I don't think is fitting is the quote on the book itself by "Stylist": "Laugh-out-loud funny" - it was definitely NOT that...

It is definitely PC, and I am definitely reading other books by Ruth Hogan!