Powerful, richly conceived ... Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters ... Although it relies on a speculative technology for its plot, The Dream Hotel is astounding, elegantly constructed, character-driven fiction.
Unsettling, meticulously observed ... Lalami has a knack for taking a flashy premise and underdelivering — that’s a compliment, by the way ... The claustrophobic authorial perspective, coupled with narration in the present tense, creates a creeping sense of disorientation ... Lalami has peered into the future and found that it looks like nothing so much as the present — which is to say dingy, corrupt, dumb, and dishonorable. And terrifying.
Lalami’s social critique has a righteous vigor, but as fiction The Dream Hotel often feels inert: Once the novel has set out its nightmarish stall, not much happens beyond an insistent delineation of the boredom and sadness and absurdity of Sara’s situation. It might seem odd to critique a book set almost entirely in a carceral facility on the grounds of its feeling airless and entrapping, but this has less to do with its narrative than its failure to break its provocative premise free of the walls around it ... Still, the novel’s central vision — a world in which the most private aspects of people’s inner lives are extracted and sold — retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.
Engrossing, well-written ... Lalami has created a substantive, chilling near future and compelled her vivid, sympathetic characters to live in it ... The novel’s startling plot twists don’t merely deliver satisfying literary dopamine hits but function as revelations that confirm our sense of how things work, even in a dystopia ... How much of this imagined future has taken place just in the time it’s taken to read the book?
Lyrical language ... A story about the consequences of unchecked power and the small acts of resistance an individual can undertake to fight an unfair system. Sometimes fiction is the best way to look at the terrifying truth and we can use it as a manual to guide us.
It’s a fascinating what-if, and in the process of exploring it, Lalami has created the exception to the usual problems with using dreams in novels ... Entertaining, but it’s also a warning.
Intriguing ... Keen insight ... Does not feel like science fiction but rather a commentary on a near future that seems frighteningly close, just out of view.
Not about Sara finding her independence or discovering her identity, as might be expected, but rather about her declaring that she will not operate within the system of the retention center, or ultimately the government and corporations that control her life. Sara eventually finds a kind of justice, but it is an unsatisfying kind of justice because it reminds us that there’s no escape from the invasion of tech.
Lalami’s restraint in introducing futuristic technology only adds to the immediacy of her concerns, and the effect is the sort of near-future nightmare that leaves us with the only dystopian question really worth asking: Are we there yet?
Especially interesting as a vision of how AI could weave itself into the two-tier system that she has described and reimagined in earlier works ... Reading The Dream Hotel is a physical experience: it’s rare for a novel to induce so strong a sense of powerlessness and frustration ... [A] sharp, sophisticated novel of forecasts and insightful takes.
In this novel that recalls the societal oppression and alienation in the works of Margaret Atwood and Franz Kafka, protagonist Sara Hussein is detained at the airport as she returns to Los Angeles from a conference in London.
