Floors

Annotation: When the inventor of a fantastical hotel goes missing and an evil businessmen plots the hotel’s demise, it’s up to the janitor’s son Leo, his pal Remi and the inventor’s beloved pet ducks to follow clues and brave the hotel’s magical and treacherous secrets to foil the businessmen’s plot and save the hotel.

Book Talk:

“You will prosper in the field of wacky inventions”

When his father uttered those final words on his deathbed, 15-year-old Merganzer Whippet took them to heart. He’d been away at boarding school for ten years, and couldn’t possibly have known his father had been speaking such gobbledygook for weeks. But it didn’t matter because Merganzer believed the words and so he made them come true; he grew up and built the most outrageous, absurd and fantastical hotel New York City had ever seen! And then he disappeared.

Meanwhile, across town, sinister businessman Bernard Frescobaldi plots against the Whippet Hotel. He has accessed Merganzer’s private files and is about to set in motion a plan to take down the inventor’s greatest creation!

Leo Fillmore lives in the basement of Whippet Hotel and assists his father, the hotel’s janitor. He has always known the Whippet is a special hotel, but it’s only after Merganzer has been missing for one hundred days that he learns its true magic. When a mysterious box with Merganzer’s image and Leo’s name appears in the special elevator for the inventor’s beloved ducks who live on the hotel’s roof, he doesn’t have a choice, but to follow the 4 peculiar instructions on the enclosed note from Merganzer’s attorney. Especially after he reads the note’s final warning:

“Don’t fail, young Mr. Fillmore, for if you do, the Whippet Hotel and all it stands for will come to an end. Only you can save the Whippet now. He’s counting on you to set things right.”

But it won’t be easy! Even with help from the new door boy Remi and Merganzer’s ducks, danger lurks along every secret tunnel, trap door and hidden floor of the hotel. Clues magically appear and then vanish on walls, and one misstep in the wrong direction and Leo could explode into fairy dust! Merganzer’s whimsically themed rooms can turn deadly too, like when Leo is forced to play his way to safety in the life-sized pinball machine room!

Will Leo be able to crack the codes, follow the clues and race his way through the maze of Merganzer’s most secret and magical creations in time to halt Bernard Fescobaldi’s evil plot? Time is ticking and it’s up to Leo to save the Whippet Hotel and set things right once and for all!


Learn more about the strange and mysterious Whippet Hotel, straight from author Patrick Carman!

"Floors by Patrick Carman" Online Posting. YouTube, 12 September 2011. Web. 1 December 2011.

Carman, Patrick. Floors. New York: Scholastic, 2011. Print.

Image courtesy of http://www.tower.com/