42 pages • 1 hour read
Emily J. TaylorHotel Magnifique
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
A courier is hired to take a boy to a strange building that mysteriously appeared in an empty alleyway, where he is greeted by a strange man.
Chapter 1 Summary
Jani and her younger sister, Zosa, live at the Bézier Residence, a boarding house where young working girls can pay to live in rooms. Jani shows Zosa a newspaper advertisement for a job at the legendary Hotel Magnifique, which only stays in the same place for one day at a time and appears in their town rarely before vanishing again. According to rumors, the hotel is enchanted. It makes its guests feel the happiest they have ever been, but guests cannot remember their stay once they leave. It is also known as the only place where magic can be used freely and safely.
Chapter 2 Summary
Crowds are gathering near the spot where the Hotel Magnifique has appeared. Some lucky people are offered coveted invitations to enter as guests by the maître d’hotel himself, Alastair, who looks like a young man. After all the invitations have been distributed, Jani asks where the interviews are being held. A young doorman advises her to go home and forget about the hotel.
Chapter 3 Summary
Jani and Zosa line up for the interviews at a nearby teahouse. Jani is turned down, but Zosa is offered a contract as a singer. Jani insists that they should not be separated, but Yrsa, the woman who interviewed them, refuses to offer her a contract. Back at the residence, Jani gets up during the night and finds Bel, the hotel’s doorman, in the kitchen. He is looking for Zosa, who must be at the hotel by midnight. Jani makes a deal with him: She procures an invitation to the hotel for herself by stealing an old one, in exchange for telling Bel where to find Zosa in time. Once she is in the hotel, he will have her sign a contract for a two-week trial.
Chapter 4 Summary
Jani is able to follow Bel and Zosa inside thanks to her invitation, but a spell makes her age at a rapid pace until she has signed her contract. She accidentally breaks an enchanted orange. Bel covers for her when Yrsa asks about her presence. Yrsa leads the two sisters to their room, which is as enchanting as the rest of the magical palace.
Chapter 5 Summary
In the morning, Jani and Zosa learn that staff orientation will be held at noon. Jani goes in search of Bel to ask him questions about her contract and is perplexed by the hotel’s ability to move rooms and create magic unexpectedly. She meets the head of housekeeping, Béatrice, who is her new boss.
Jani finds Yrsa working at the bar and learns that Yrsa is an alchemist. Yrsa offers Jani an enchanted drink that contains, unbeknownst to her, some truth serum. When Bel asks Jani about her sister and their past, Jani answers honestly despite her distrust of him. The two sisters left their hometown of Aligney after their mother died to find work in the bigger city of Durc, but they have been unsuccessful. Jani is planning to save money and return to Aligney with her sister.
Chapter 6 Summary
The sisters attend orientation. They learn that if a guest or staff member is still outside the hotel after midnight, they disappear without a trace. Béatrice takes charge of the maids, while the Madame des Rêves (or Madame of Dreams) takes care of Zosa and the other performers. Zosa is given a different room from Jani, who returns to her room alone.
Chapter 7 Summary
Bel meets Jani and shows her a weather closet, which gives the illusion of standing just outside the hotel. He tells her that, in his hurry, he accidentally made her sign a guest contract instead of a staff one, which means that Jani will experience much more of the hotel’s magic. He warns her not to tell anyone about it or there may be dangerous consequences. They meet Zelig, a lift attendant, who used to be a king who squandered his fortune so he could spend 12 years at the hotel, resulting in the Hotel Magnifique being banned from Isle Parnasse, his home country.
Chapter 8 Summary
Jani takes a wrong turn and accidentally finds herself at the soirée organized by the maître for the guests, which maids are forbidden to attend. She is dazzled by the extravagantly dressed guests and the magical shows put on by powerful “suminaires,” or enchanters. After their performances, The Magnifique, who is the most powerful suminaire in the hotel, makes a show of moving the hotel to a different place at the stroke of midnight. Jani is mortified to learn that Bel is in fact the Magnifique.
Chapter 9 Summary
Béatrice shows the maids around some of the guests’ suites. While cleaning them, Jani realizes that the other maids seem strangely forgetful and afraid of disobeying the rules. Béatrice demonstrates her powers as a suminaire by fixing a door’s mechanics with the help of a magical tin of gears. When Jani asks her how her magic works, Béatrice refuses to answer. Later, Jani has an odd encounter with the maître in a hallway, who gets angry when he catches her touching some of the magical items meant for the guests.
Chapter 10 Summary
Jani accidentally interferes with a game orchestrated for the guests that maids are forbidden from. She finds herself trapped in a giant teapot with guests, who are trying to solve a riddle and find the exit before it fills up with tea. Red, the suminaire in charge of the game, refuses to let Jani out until the riddle is solved. Jani pushes the guests to break up the game, resulting in Red being sent to the maître to be punished. Béatrice helps Jani hide and brings her to Bel.
Prologue-Chapter 10 Analysis
The first part of Hotel Magnifique introduces the main characters, plot points, and whimsical tone of the story. The novel is narrated in first person from Jani’s point of view. The story is set in a fictional world with names inspired by the French language and in an unspecified past that draws from different time periods. The transient hotel—which moves locations every night—creates a sense of wonder and a romanticized, mystical setting for the characters. The hotel establishes the magical realism of the story and its fantastical atmosphere.
The Prologue and Epilogue are the only parts of the novel narrated in the third person. The Prologue is seen from the point of view of a courier tasked with delivering a boy to a mysterious location, where she is greeted by a strange man. Although no names are used, the reader can later surmise that the boy is a young Bel, the building is the Hotel Magnifique, and the man is Alastair. The lack of names and detail emphasizes the courier’s sense of confusion and unease. This creates suspense and foreshadows the dark secrets Jani later uncovers at the hotel.
Jani is characterized as mature and serious. Through her, the novel explores Power and Responsibility. Jani is very protective of her younger sister, Zosa, who is more frivolous and naïve. Jani insists on not being separated from Zosa, emphasizing their strong relationship. Jani is also audacious and driven by her longing for adventure. Combined with her goal to bring Zosa home, this leads her to seek out a job at the Hotel Magnifique. Jani’s bargaining with Bel characterizes her as strong-willed and clever. In addition, Jani idealizes her past life in Aligney and mistakenly believes that going back there will fulfill her, introducing the theme of Memory and Identity.
These chapters set up several important plot points. Bel’s warning to Jani, for instance, suggests the dangerous nature of the hotel: “If I were you, I would go straight home. Pretend the hotel never came” (19). Jani interprets this as an insult and slight on her social status: “He probably warned me away because he didn’t think I belonged in a place like the Hotel Magnifique” (20).
Jani breaks a marvelous orange, foreshadowing the revelation of her magical abilities. Her arrival at the hotel is depicted in ambiguous terms, contrasting her awe and wonder at the building’s magic with the immediate threat to her life when she begins aging too fast. As a result, she is forced to sign a contract to save her own life. This hints at the deceiving nature of the contracts, which are often signed under coercion.
The rules of the hotel are introduced from Jani’s point of view as she learns to navigate her new setting. This narration perspective allows both the protagonist and the reader, who are equally ignorant about the world of the hotel, to learn the rules in parallel. The parameters are established through characters like Bel, Yrsa, and Béatrice, who explain them to Jani and, by extension, to the reader. In this fictional world, magic is a well-known occurrence. The danger that magic poses outside of the hotel means that Jani, although aware of its existence, has never experienced it directly. Jani has an ambivalent relationship with magic, which hints at the eventual revelation that she is a suminaire herself.
Jani has signed the wrong contract, which means she is able to experience the full extent of the hotel’s magic in addition to keeping memories of her past. As a result, Jani is the only character whose identity is complete and, most importantly, outside of Alastair’s control. She consistently goes back and forth between the guest and worker spaces, for instance, and is able to defeat an illusion with her reasoning skills when she accidentally steps into a magical game. This positions her as a threat to Alastair as well as his antithesis, which the narrative later reveals. Jani’s true power comes from her magic and her freedom, whereas Alastair steals power due to his lack of magic and desire for control.
