The Enders Hotel: A Memoir by Brandon R. Schrand

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Schrand has never met his father, and his mother and stepfather are alcoholics on an unsteady quest to keep body and soul together. So it's no surprise that the young Schrand would find his first sense of home under the perpetually leaky roof of the old Enders Hotel, run by his grandparents in Soda Springs, Idaho.

In 1900, German brothers -- who presumably had no idea how apropos the name would become -- built the Enders in a town that followed a boom/bust cycle depending on the vagaries of the local industries. The hotel hosts a revolving cast of aimless characters: a homeless family of Texans, a friendless former boxing champ, a drunken painter, and a thieving trapper. A shadowy counterpoint to Eloise at the shimmering Plaza, Schrand explores his hotel home, finding hidden and forgotten treasures, including a stairway that probably saw plenty of use during Prohibition.

For Schrand and his friend B.J. -- boys whose vision isn't yet calibrated to the signs of inevitable decay -- the Enders was magical, offering unlimited sodas, pie, and other delights at the café counter. The end, however, is fated. As Schrand loses the only home he has known, he begins to fall into the trap scripted for such kids: small delinquencies that grow into larger acts of cruelty and rage. If he's to be saved, he must save himself. His success is a triumph of determination. (Summer 2008 Selection)

From the Publisher

In the center of the rural boomtown of Soda Springs, Idaho, stands the historic Enders Hotel, Café, and Bar, a three-story brick building that has been many things to many people. But to one family who bought it as an attempt to renew themselves it was home, a place they desperately tried to hold on to and yet, after seventeen years of living there, the very place from which they wanted to escape.
 
Growing up under its leaking roof, Brandon R. Schrand watched a cast of broken characters pass through the hotel doors—an alcoholic artist, a forgotten boxing champ, an ex-con, a homeless family—and tried to find his own identity among those revolving faces. Haunted by a father he had never seen, he tested the faces of those drifters for familiarity. Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, The Enders Hotel reveals the promises and warnings of western boomtown life—stories of alcoholism, murder, betrayal, hope, and finally, redemption.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School

This memoir is a classic coming-of-age story in which the author casts himself as an antihero in the tradition of Holden Caulfield. Schrand's stories of life at the family-owned Enders Hotel in Soda Springs, ID, resonate with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth and yet are balanced with the sober vision of hindsight. This is ironic because alcoholism and drug use, and their consequences, pervade the narrative. The author evokes a unique sense of place with what is essentially a series of vignettes from his childhood. He introduces readers to a ragtag and at times sorry cast of characters searching for purpose and dignity. This common narrative thread ties strongly to his search for "manhood" and his missing father. Schrand's specificity and eye for detail transport readers to the desolate environs of the Enders Hotel. This book will appeal to anyone who has ever felt out of place or out of step with the world, especially teen males.-Jennifer Waters, Red Deer Public Library, Alberta, Canada

Kirkus Reviews

Memories of a boyhood spent among the beaten-down boarders who drifted through his family's hotel in a rural Idaho town. Since 1919, the three-story brick hotel, complete with cafe and bar, has anchored downtown Soda Springs, the prosperity of which has always been tied to the notorious vicissitudes of mining, farming and ranching. Schrand's family had the misfortune of running the hotel during a period of decline-the author's grandparents purchased the property in 1975 for $250,000 and sold it in 1992 for $85,000-when the once-grand edifice required as much repair as its motley patrons. Schrand (Creative Writing/Univ. of Idaho) sprinkles portraits of these folks-"Kid" Barger, a once famous boxer; Maya, an artist and recovering alcoholic; Vic, the ex-con; Trapper Jim, who scrounged the hotel alleyway for bait; Larry, who shot and killed his best friend-throughout the narrative. For a young child, the hotel exerted a certain kind of magic, which Schrand effectively captures in his reminiscences: exploring the vast basement with its collection of abandoned suitcases; sitting at a stool in the cafe eating burgers and sodas; anticipating the extra excitement that came with hunting season; building a clubhouse near the geyser out back; constructing a raft to "escape" from Soda Springs. Holding the enterprise-and to a large extent, young Schrand's life-together were his grandparents, whose charity and decency reassured a boy who never knew his father. As Schrand grew older, work and responsibilities mounted, as did the feeling that the hotel might be a failing venture. He worked out his resentment and anger in acts of gratuitous cruelty and petty vandalism that threatened to mark him for afuture not so different from the dead-enders the hotel often sheltered. An evocative account of a man coming to terms with his youth.

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