Review: Minneapolis writer Kate DiCamillo is back with ‘The Hotel Balzaar,’ and it may be her best book yet

If you like stories, I’d bet money you’ll enjoy Kate DiCamillo’s “The Hotel Balzaar.” It’s a book about storytelling.

As I was reading, I kept making mental notes about other stories it reminded me of: Many readers will join me in going to the classic “A Little Princess,” in which another girl longs for a father who is at war. But because the book’s tales-inside-of-tales structure asks us to think about stories, it also encourages us to pull our favorites into the experience of reading it.

Even more than most books, your reading of “The Hotel Balzaar” will be singular because it will depend so much on other stories you have loved.

Marta lives in the titular hotel with her mother, who is a maid there. The hotel is in the fictional land of Norendy, which seems vaguely European and which was also the setting of last year’s “The Puppets of Spelhorst,” which overlaps a bit with “Balzaar.”

Marta is one of those lonely kids who finds adventure by interacting with the adults in her world, including a kind doorman, a not-as-kind concierge and an elderly countess with a pet parrot. The countess also has lots of borderline-magical stories, which she shares with Marta (and us).

Quickly, it becomes clear that these stories are going to help Marta, who has plenty to be sad about but who tries not to dwell on that. It also becomes clear that telling the stories helps the countess, who probably doesn’t find connections with many other people and whose storytelling is motivated by a secret or two. (”What matters is the story. What matters, you see, is that the story gets told,” she insists.) And the book may be over before you realize that, as you reflect on the stories of your own life, it might be helping you, too.

I think that’s because all of the tales in “Balzaar” create a sense of a book interacting, in your brain, with other books you have read.

Written with DiCamillo’s characteristic grace and humor, its straightforward plot and tender language feel like they’re in conversation with other great stories, which is why I started to think about the Lemony Snicket books, about Joan Didion and Flannery O’Connor. You may not think of any of them; there are no overt connections in the book, and it certainly doesn’t crib from them. But I bet you’ll have references of your own as “Balzaar” invites you to consider your own favorite storytellers.

Obviously, all books mean something different to different readers, because each of us is unique. Even more than most, though, “The Hotel Balzaar” invites us to recall our favorite books and figure out how “Balzaar” fits with them.

DiCamillo knows it’s the version of the book that forms in your mind that’s most important — and that “The Hotel Balzaar” doesn’t really exist until readers get to work.

The Hotel Balzaar

By: Kate DiCamillo.

Publisher: Candlewick, 160 pages, $17.99.