Hotel Magnifique

Zosa is Jani’s 13-year-old sister. She is characterized as bright and loveable, as well as bold and stubborn. She can be cheeky and often provides comic relief, contrasting with her older sister’s more serious demeanor.

The story begins on Zosa’s birthday, with Jani bringing her an advertisement for jobs at the Hotel Magnifique. Zosa is a very talented singer; when she auditions, she is immediately offered a contract to work as a performer at the hotel. Although she is excited about the opportunity, Jani insists that the two sisters cannot be separated. When Jani learns that Zosa is kept in captivity as a bird in the aviary in between shows, she plans to free her sister. Protecting Zosa is Jani’s main motivation throughout the story.

Over the course of the story, Jani realizes that she has never let Zosa make her own decisions, believing that her duty as an older sister trumps Zosa’s desires. In the end, Jani lets Zosa exercise her agency, and they work together to take Alastair down. Zosa suffers some trauma when Alastair has Yrsa sever some of her fingers, but at the end of the book, the two sisters’ relationship is restored.

Bel works at the Hotel Magnifique as the doorman. He is a powerful suminaire nicknamed “The Magnifique” because he can use his artéfact, a key he wears around his neck, to magically transport the hotel to different places. On Alastair’s orders, he moves the hotel every night at midnight. The maître has tasked him with finding lost artéfacts across the world.

When Jani meets Bel, she suggests that he is a foil to the maître. While Alastair is cold, reflected by his “blindingly pale” skin, Bel’s “warm copper skin” suggests kindness (17). She hints at their attraction, highlighting “the vivid brown eyes that stare[] down at [her]” (17). She also notices that “one of his fingers [isn’t] a finger at all but a finely carved and polished piece of wood” concealing a switchblade (27), the result of a punishment inflicted by Yrsa. Bel is characterized as strong-minded but caring, although he tends to push people away because he believes that love can only hurt. Over the course of the story, however, he develops a romantic relationship with Jani.

At first, Bel does not remember his true name or his past before he came to work at the hotel. He reluctantly does Alastair’s bidding because, in return, the maître rewards him with pieces of his memories. At the end, Bel learns that his parents, who were afraid of his magical abilities, gave him up to Alastair willingly. He decides to stay at the hotel because he has found Home and Belonging with Jani. When Jani asks him what his real name is, the young man symbolically embraces his identity as Bel, reflecting his desire to make the hotel his home through his identity as Bel. 

Alastair is the mysterious and sinister maître d’hotel. He has the reputation of being “the greatest suminaire in all the world” because he runs the Hotel Magnifique (16), the only place where magic is made safe and suminaires are free. He uses the hotel as a front to foment his nefarious plans. His true aim is to keep suminaires in captivity as birds so he can drain them of their magic and travel the world with the hotel in search of powerful artéfacts. Alastair is greedy and cruel, often terrorizing his workers and bestowing punishments in the form of physical torture. He often makes Yrsa, one of his second-in-commands, remove people’s eyes and limbs and turn them into porcelain.

When she first sees him, Jani notes that Alastair looks very young: “Nineteen. Twenty, at most. Outrageously young” (16), a fact which she attributes to his magic. Later, she notices him seemingly aging back and forth due to the magic he steals from other people via the hand mirror. Alastair’s main artéfact is “a slim inkwell filled with shimmering purple ink [and] capped with a silver stopper in the mold of a wolf’s head, its jaws biting down as if the wolf feasted upon the well itself” (99-100). The artifact, with its wolfish appearance, implies that Alastair is predatory. Alastair uses the enchanted ink to draw up contracts that bind workers to his will and erase people’s memories, as well as to cast other spells to maintain the illusion that he is a great suminaire.

As Alastair’s estranged sister, Céleste, tells Jani, Alastair has no magical power of his own. When Céleste was invited to join the Société des Suminaires, she refused to leave her brother behind. As a result, Alastair took over the society and used artéfacts to imbue himself with power, thus building his reputation as the greatest suminaire in the world. In the end, he is defeated by Issig and taken prisoner by the hotel’s newly freed workers.

Béatrice is one of the suminaires working at the Hotel Magnifique as the head of housekeeping. She is described as “a petite maid with light skin and rosy cheeks [and] blonde ringlets framing her pointed chin” (48). Her artéfact is a tin canister containing a set of gears that she uses to fix mechanical things. She is characterized by her compassion. Jani argues that Béatrice’s artéfact reflects how she “genuinely [cares] about the people who work for [her and wants] to always keep [them] together, to fix [anyone] who [feels] broken” (336).

Béatrice is depicted as smart and feisty, with a taste for beautiful dresses and luxury. She and Jani develop a strong friendship over the course of the story. As Jani states, “She’d become a good friend, even in spite of her big opinions, and little respect for personal space” (133).

Béatrice also has a sister, Margot, who owns a café and has grown old while Béatrice has stayed young thanks to her magic. At first, the sisters do not remember each other because of Alastair’s memory spells. After Jani has destroyed the magical contracts, however, their memories are restored, and the sisters happily reunite.