The Grand Hotel Of Feelings - Possibly Our Favourite Book. Why?
The Grand Hotel Of Feelings - Lidia Brankovic
Aimed reading age: 4-8 years
It must be our best-selling book of all time, we order it in much larger quantities than any other book and it sells out every time. We often have people’s phone numbers and email addresses scribbled down because they want a copy when we’re inbetween having the stock in.
Why is it so popular? Let’s unpack.
The concept is quite simple (all good children’s books are); there is a hotel called The Grand Hotel Of Feelings, all the guests checking into the hotel are different emotions, and there is a hotel manager who sees to their wants and needs.
“Sadness speaks in a small voice. If I don’t listen carefully, I won’t hear what Sadness is telling me and then he will stay for a very long time”
“I once made the mistake of putting Anger in a small room, far away, so she wouldn’t disturb the other guests. But I found out that when you lock Anger away, she can turn into all sorts of other feelings; Guilt, Depression, and even Shame. It’s best to give Anger space to make her noise, so she can leave quickly”
“When there are too many feelings making too many demands, that’s when Anxiety checks in. Anxiety is forever changing forms. Sometimes he looks like Fear and other times he looks like Guilt. He loves the spotlight and he tries to distract me from all the other feelings in the hotel”
As an adult who never fully learned how to regulate my own ‘negative’ emotions as a child, and trying desperately to break the cycle for my own kids, this book is amazing. I will often cry while reading it and get scathing and pitying looks from my five-year-old daughter - I think I’m definitely giving her the ick. But I don’t care, she will not be emotionally repressed if it’s the last thing I do.
The illustrations are simply stunning, I almost want to cut them out and frame them.
In October 2024 the author and illustrator released her new book: The Circus Of Shadows
This book is more abstract than The Grand Hotel Of Feelings, it’s less direct, but the message is very similar: we need to accept all parts of ourselves, even the ‘negative’ parts, as it’s what makes us us.
From the publisher:
”Lika has never given much thought to her shadow. Sometimes it’s long, sometimes it’s short… but it's never anything more than a shadow. That is until the day it starts acting strangely. When Lika waves a hand, Shadow raises a foot. When Lika sits down, Shadow stands up. Lika tries to hide, but the smaller she makes herself, the bigger Shadow becomes. When Shadow whisks Lika off to a curious land of shadows – and right into a spooky shadow circus – she must look deep inside herself to find her way back home.
A poignant and uplifting book about exploring and acknowledging the parts of ourselves that we try to hide from and embracing the shadows within.”
“There is a place inside all of us that is completely secret and completely private. It is so secret and private that it’s easy to forget that it even exists. In that secret place, the shadows like to play”
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