Trying to Float - Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel - Grand Format

Part Eloise, part Tile Grand Budapest Hotel, part early David Sedaris, a seventeen-year-old's darkly funny, bighearted memoir about growing up in a legendary New York City hotel New York's Chelsea Hotel may no longer be home to its most famous denizens - Andy Warhol, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, to name a few - but the eccentric spirit of the Chelsea is alive and well. Meet the family Rips : father Michael, a lawyer turned writer with a penchant for fine tailoring ; mother Sheila, a former model and renowned artist who matches her welding outfits with couture ; and daughter Nicolaia, a precocious high school senior working on a record of her peculiar seventeen years.
Nicolaia is a perpetual outsider who has struggled to find her place in schools populated by cliquish girls and loudmouthed boys. But at the Chelsea, Nicolaia need not look far to find her tribe. There's her neighbour Stormé, a tall woman who keeps a pink handgun strapped to her ankle ; her babysitter, Jade, who may or may not have a second career as an escort ; her friend Artie, former proprietor of New York's most famous nightclubs.
The kids at school might never understand her, but as Nicolaia endeavours to fit in, she begins to understand that the Chelsea's motley crew could hold the key to surviving the perils of a Manhattan childhood. A disarming, humble, heartfelt and wise tale of coming of age in New York City, Trying to Float is a triumphant parable for the power of embracing difference in all its forms.