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The Dream Hotel

A Read with Jenna Pick: A Novel

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 12 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 12 weeks
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.
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    • Kirkus

      Starred review from January 15, 2025
      A woman is detained under an American regime where even dreams are being surveilled. Lalami's stellar fifth novel concerns Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American woman who's returning home from a conference in London to her family in L.A. when she's held by the Risk Assessment Administration, a federal agency that uses biometric data to assess citizens' "pre-crime" tendencies. She's done nothing troubling, but her "risk score" is high enough to force a stay at an all-woman "retention center" that's effectively a prison. Though her stay is supposed to be brief, the smallest hiccups lead to extensions, and the private-prison firm contracted by RAA charges extortionate rates for everything from emails to clean sheets; Sara and the other retainees are also expected to work to lower their scores, labor that partly involves feeding AI models. There are echoes ofThe Handmaid's Tale here--as Margaret Atwood does in that book, Lalami builds a convincing near-future dystopia out of current events, and Sara plots a similar small-scale resistance. But Lalami's scenario is unique and well-imagined--interspersed report sheets, transcripts, and terms-of-service lingo have a realistic, poignant lyricism that exposes the cruel bureaucracy in which Sara is trapped. (Not for nothing does she have a Borges book checked out of the library.) And the story exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech's capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought. It's a fiction-workshop cliche that dreams are unnecessary, but here they play a crucial role in the plot, opening up questions of what we're sacrificing in the name of convenience and safety. The novel's striking message is summarized in Sara's retort to a bureaucrat who tells her the data doesn't lie: "It doesn't tell the truth, either." An engrossing and troubling dystopian tale.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      February 1, 2025

      Award-winning Lalami's (Conditional Citizens) new novel starts with Sara's arrest by the Risk Assessment Administration after data from her dreams indicates that she will soon commit a crime against her husband. As a result, she is required to spend 21 days under observation, along with others convicted of dream deviations. While many of the novel's devices are commonplace tropes--AI surveillance, for example--Lalami's distinctive writing style adds a layered edge, effecting a strange, reverberating quietness that abruptly yet elegantly morphs into critiques of systemic inequities in the book's dystopian world. The story feels urgent and real, but this is not a fast-paced thriller, although elements of that genre come into play. Instead, Lalami leans toward the speed of thoughts, their lack of linearity, and the strange overlap between the feeling and thinking worlds of people's inner lives, here made visible and tactile through AI. VERDICT A beautifully executed, plot-driven, yet cerebral meditation on AI. Perfect for those looking for something to read while awaiting the forthcoming film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun.--Emily Bowles

      Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      February 1, 2025
      "To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others." It has been 20 years since a massacre at the Super Bowl led to the establishment of the Risk Assessment Administration, which uses personal data to prevent future crimes. Those the RAA deems "questionable" are subject to indefinite periods of retention. Coming home from a business trip, Sara Hussein is detained at LAX by officers who cite her elevated crime risk score as justification. Desperate to get back to her husband and twin toddlers, she scrambles to answer their questions. She has committed no offense. With no end to the investigation in sight and her family waiting, Sara struggles to keep her emotions in check to avoid further suspicion. Lalami's (The Other Americans, 2019) fourth novel explores predictive policing and what is lost when people choose the promise of safety over individual freedom. Fans of The Minority Report (2002), by Philip K. Dick, and Our Missing Hearts (2022), by Celeste Ng, will enjoy this literary novel set in the near future.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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