The Dream Hotel
A Novel
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3.8 • 172 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ● READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ● From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.
The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Kafka’s The Trial meets Minority Report in this dystopian fable about a Moroccan American historian who is torn away from her husband and young children and imprisoned for a future crime that U.S. governmental data analysis suggests she might commit. Sara Hussein is stopped at LAX because her criminal risk score is unacceptable due to some violent dreams recorded by her neural implant. She is “retained” for what is supposed to be a short stint, performing labor for the facility’s corporate owner and becoming an unwitting subject of their experiments. Gradually, she starts to understand how her choices, petty decisions made by others, and unfeeling bureaucratic and corporate forces have led her here. But is that understanding enough to get her out? Pulitzer finalist Laila Lalami has some unsettling ideas about how technological innovations lead big business and big government to treat people as monetizable data points, not as individual human beings who suffer under their sweeping mandates. More importantly, she makes us care deeply about Sara’s predicament.
Customer Reviews
Good read but …
A bit slow…yet impactful.
A modern day 1984, but feminist
I didn’t know what to expect with this book but it ended with me reading it in just a few days, I was hooked. The lead character is written in a way that invites you to be invested in her story. While she’s fearful of her circumstance she does take small leaps of courage until finally she finds her strength. This story will anger he frustrate you with its many injustices against women. It will also make you think deeply about our modern world of surveillance be how easily this could be our future. I highly recommend this book!
Great concept, terribly executed
So much rambling. Somehow the language was simple yet so difficult to read. I forced myself to finish it because I really had hope that there would be some twist or something to redeem it but there was none.
Normally I love sci-fi or horror or classic literature so I’m used to dense but this felt like rambling.