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    Trying to Float: Chronicles of a Girl in the Chelsea Hotel
    Trying to Float: Chronicles of a Girl in the Chelsea Hotel
    Trying to Float: Chronicles of a Girl in the Chelsea Hotel
    Audiobook4 hours

    Trying to Float: Chronicles of a Girl in the Chelsea Hotel

    Written by Nicolaia Rips

    Narrated by Nicolaia Rips

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    “Hysterically droll, touching, elegant, and wise—a coming-of-age story from someone who possibly came of age before her parents” (Patricia Marx, New Yorker writer and bestselling author), Trying to Float is a seventeen-year-old’s darkly funny, warmhearted memoir about growing up in New York City’s legendary Chelsea Hotel.

    Meet the family Rips: father Michael, a lawyer turned writer with a penchant for fine tailoring; mother Sheila, a former model and renowned sculptor who matches her welding outfits with couture; and daughter Nicolaia, a precocious and wry high school student at work on a highly unusual extracurricular activity, an official record of her peculiar childhood.

    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 she has found her tribe. There’s her neighbor Stormé, a tall albino 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 endeavors to fit in, she realizes that the Chelsea’s motley crew could hold the key to surviving the perils of her adolescence.

    “Nicolaia Rips is an old-soul sophisticate. Trying to Float is like Eloise meets Wes Anderson” (Elle), and not since Holden Caulfield has there been such a fabulously compelling teen guide to New York City. Rips’s debut is “charmingly self-deprecating and very funny…at once highly insightful and deeply familiar” (W Magazine), a triumphant parable for the power of embracing difference in all its forms. Her “engaging story with a big heart…will appeal to adults and teens alike” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJul 12, 2016
    ISBN9781508218715
    Trying to Float: Chronicles of a Girl in the Chelsea Hotel
    Author

    Nicolaia Rips

    Nicolaia Rips is a freshman at Brown University (class of 2020). She has lived at the Chelsea Hotel for her entire life. In her spare time, she studies vocal music, participates in team sports, reads avidly, and tolerates her parents. Trying to Float is her first book.

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    Reviews for Trying to Float

    3.5/5

    15 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      So fun to listen to! I think anyone can relate to feeling a kinship in some way to the struggles of youth.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      TRYING TO FLOAT is a coming-of-age memoir by a young misfit living with her parents at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. Nicolaia Rips has problems connecting with her schoolmates, but bonds easily with the many strange people living at the Chelsea. Although often humorous, this memoir has a disingenuous feel to it. Her classmates seem to be meaner than you would expect from typical middle school popular kids and the eccentrics inhabiting the Chelsea lobby seem stranger than fiction. Her parents are a bit too disengaged and her telling of the challenges she faced seems just a little too whiney. Considering that she is a 17 year-old neophyte to writing with a father who is a professional writer, one suspects her father may have had a hand in the editing because the writing seems a little too mature and nuanced for a typical pre-adolescent. Admittedly, Nicolaia was not a typical pre-adolescent. Obviously, she was a precocious and intelligent child, but still she seems too wise and self-deprecating for her age.The narrative consists of a series of short chapters focusing on anecdotes from her interactions with her peers and the inhabitants of the Chelsea. It is essentially the diary of a young girl, but lacks the honesty that was so evident in Anne Frank’s diary. The narrative has little plot development or tension. Instead its focus is on character sketches. In the final analysis, this is an amusing, but not particularly innovative memoir of a girl who may yet be just a bit too young to be writing a memoir.