The Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Novel
$14.99
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.
From the Publisher
ASIN : B0DGPDZ7CK
Publisher : Pantheon (March 4, 2025)
Publication date : March 4, 2025
Language : English
File size : 5.6 MB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 385 pages
📚 Dianne 📚 –
The Dream Hotel – What a Great Book!
[...]Wow, what a powerful book. I highly recommend this book to all lovers of futuristic, horror, and women’s fiction.This is a look at what can happen when we let our lives become too entangled with Smart products, allow cookies into our lives, and allow any company that mines for data to get ahold of us. It’s too late for most of us, but had I read this novel decades ago, I would never have let a computer or smart phone into my life. Of course, this is just fiction, right? Or is it? The ideas in this novel may very well become a true thing of the not-so-distant future. We have no privacy anymore, so why not take away the one last thing that is private…our dreams that we have while sleeping.sband are having a terrible problem with sleep issues. They have just had twins and can’t seem to get any rest, and it’s affecting their lives. Sometimes to dangerous levels. So they get this dream implant that will help them sleep better and become refreshed in less than 8 hours. Nobody let them know of what else this handy sleep help could do to them. Naturally, Sara and her husband had failed to read all of the fine print – all 15 or so pages. Now, we can be monitored for committing crimes in the future, crimes that we would never consider or carry out outside of our daydreaming and night dreams.As the synopsis/recap states, Sara is detained on her way home from a trip; she must now be detained for her own good. Due to this implant/machine, we have a score, and each infraction increases our score. Believe me, that is not a good thing.I can’t discuss much more of this book without giving a lot of it away. This is the perfect horror novel (well, to me, it was a horror novel) because it uses a lot of truth while creating its fiction.*ARC supplied by the publisher Pantheon Press/ Penguin Random House, the author, and NetGalley.
William de Rham –
Imprisoning citizens for their dreams.
[...]“The Dream Hotel” is a dystopian novel set in California in the very near future. More literary than action-oriented, it imagines a society very much like ours today but with significant and disturbing differences caused by various technologies. Much of the novel is very well done. Some parts seemed more drawn out than they needed to be. Turns out, there’s a reason for that.Returning home from a professional conference in London, museum archivist Sara Hussein is detained by agents of the Risk Assessment Administration. An implant Sara wears to help her sleep has enabled the RAA to monitor her dreams. That, combined with various incidents and technologies, including AI, causes the RAA to believe that Sara may soon murder her husband.She is immediately taken to a “retention center” for a 21-day evaluation. The center is not as dangerous as a prison. Like Sara, the other “retainees” are not criminals and have not broken the law. But the center is very regimented and restrictive with many rules that must be obeyed. Rule-breakers are liable to have their stays extended (and extended and extended). The rules being unclear and open to varying interpretations by the guards, they’re very easy to break. Obtaining a hearing to gain release is difficult since they’re subject to all kinds of bureaucratic delays. Sara’s initial 21 days stretch into months, during which time her professional life implodes, and her family suffers greatly. As the novel progresses and Sara becomes more resentful and rebellious, it doesn’t look like she’ll be returning home anytime soon. How will she extricate herself, if ever?Author Laila Lalami has given readers a well-written, absorbing novel. Her characters are deeply drawn and invite us to identify and empathize with them. The world she builds and the future she foretells are imagined with clarity and specificity. Some of the technology she writes about already exists. Some does not (and may never). Hopefully, the uses to which those technologies are put will never become reality.I had expected there to be more drama and suspense, even danger. There usually is in stories of this type–novels and films like “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Minority Report,” and “1984.” But Ms. Lalami eschewed that option to focus on the powerlessness, stagnation, frustration, and dehumanization caused by the Risk Assessment Administration, the retention centers, and the incarceration of those technology predicts will commit a crime. She shows us a mundane, bureaucratic kind of authoritarianism. No swastikas or jackboots or torchlight parades; just a complete loss of freedom for crimes never committed. It’s a novel that invites our outrage. It is a cautionary tale.My thanks to NetGalley, author Laila Lalami, and publisher Pantheon Books for providing me with a complimentary ARC. All of the foregoing is my honest, independent opinion.