This dystopian novel follows Sara Hussein, a woman detained by a government agency after her dreams suggest she might commit a violent act. In a future where AI analyzes dreams to predict potential crimes, Sara is held in a private detention center alongside other women flagged for similar "pre-crimes." It was very reminiscent of Minority Report, but updated to reflect the current political climate. The story explores the dangers of surveillance, the misuse of technology, and the ethical dilemmas of predictive policing. It is a gripping tale, and I highly recommend it for book clubs, as it is certain to raise many questions.

4.5/5

A brilliant fictive commentary on criminal justice, surveillance, capitalism, and activism.

How might the prison-industrial complex worsen with the advance and ubiquity of technology?

I love books like this that are great recommendations for women <i>and</i> men. Would make a good book club pick, as there are lots of things to discuss.

In The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami envisions a dystopian future where after a devastating mass shooting, dreams are monitored and Americans are given a risk score in order to prevent future violence. The main character, Sara, is detained due to postpartum dreams that indicate to the Risk Assessment Agency that her husband may be in danger. What is originally to be a twenty-one day period of observation turns into a lengthy ordeal that raises many questions relevant to what we’re seeing today with technological advances and authoritarian legislation.

The Dream Hotel seems like a cautionary tale warning us of what could happen if we open ourselves up to more surveillance. If we think we’re among the “good people” who would never pose any risks or be targeted. If we place too much trust in technology (especially AI) to solve our problems.

This is a disturbing but necessary read because Sara’s response to her detainment, her observations of the world around her, and her work toward freedom offers hope that there is always a way out.

DNF - 14%

I tried to continue reading this book multiple times. It's been months, and I've made very little progress. I think the idea is good, but I don't think I'm in the right mindset to read it. It has good reviews, so I believe it's probably a good book. Unfortunately, I am just struggling with the writing style and the topic of the book. It's a little too heavy for me. Maybe I'll revisit in the future.

absolutely in LOVE with laila’s prose oh my goddddd this book was such a masterpiece! did not want it to end. being a computer science student myself really makes this book hit hard </3 so so good.

With our personal information supposedly being uploaded into a master database as we speak, this book scared the bejeezus out of me. Note to self... in the future if anyone offers you an implant that promises you good sleep JUST SAY NO!
It's not often that a book has the power to impact me in this way. I'm usually not a fan of dystopian reads but I enjoyed this thoroughly. I love how it showed the bonds that women form when they're under duress and the strength of the female spirit.
Thank you to Pantheon books and NetGalley for the review copy!

Fine -- a great idea but not well executed at the end. Not sure Lalami had a story past the original idea of this high concept spec fiction.

Dystopian fiction where social media & dreams are used to 'rehabilitate' people who may commit future crimes is hitting a bit too close to home these days but I would still pick up the Dream Hotel. Well written and engaging while simultaneously terrifying and infuriating the story focuses on Sara, an Arab-American woman who is detained at LAX after returning from a work conference from London, there is no real reason why she's detained beyond a vague 'your score is over the limit at 518' (500 is the max apparently). So she's sent to a 'rehabilitation' facility which is run like a jail and every arbitrary infraction adds to your initial 21 day stay. Lots of the slippery slope of forcing inmates to work for outside companies, how social media, even dreams can be used against you and underlying it all the lovely way the US treats people of color.

The Dream Hotel was very difficult for me to read personally. It is about the dangers of a society focused on potential problems that they create new ones, lacking compassion and human understanding. It reads like a nightmare, and a familiar narrative at that: being misunderstood and exploited for truth, in spite of it, living in fear. Vibes on par with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It is Kafka's The Trial, but more realistic with our modern computerized overlords. Big Brother is here to stay, so be careful of the liberties you sign away as a trade for convenience. You may give away more than you know.
This book is very well written, carefully developed, and utilizing so much of our current reality that it is more speculative fiction than scifi. Reader Beware the unflinching take on racism, sexism, and confinement without cause.
Thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon for this ARC!

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami masterfully weaves together lush storytelling and poignant cultural insight, offering a vibrant tapestry of displaced dreams and earnest longing. Lalami’s elegant prose and richly drawn characters make this novel an unforgettable exploration of identity, belonging, and the power of human connection.

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a dystopian sci-fi futuristic book. What would happen if someone was monitoring your dreams and could take action on what occurred during your dream state? That is what happened to Sara, and she ended up being placed in the Madison,a Risk Assessment Administration Detention facility, for 21 days. The reason is that she dreamed of killing her husband. Lalami has created speculative fiction to explore surveillance, data retention, societal roles, privacy, and so much more. The ending seemed a little rushed, but you walk away pondering what you just read. It's a great book club book to foster discussion.

I finished The Dream Hotel awhile back but between out world today and what was supposed to be speculative dystopian fiction, I was having a hard time deciding how to talk about this book.

Brief Synopsis:
Sara is a museum curator who returns from a yearly work conference only to be detained by the Risk Assessment Administration because her risk score has become slightly elevated above normal range. The algorithm has decided based on her dreams (tracked by a neural implant designed to help her sleep better) that she is a threat to her husband and must be detained at a retention facility until her risk score goes down. Only once at the facility it’s nearly impossible to get her score down as the rules shift at the guards whims.

This book explores the correlation of privacy and freedom, as we give more of ourselves away to the public eye (and the panopticon) what does this mean for our freedom. I was about halfway through this book when the news that the govt would begin to monitor social media of LGBTQ + community, which we have now seen continue with the immigrant community in this country so this felt less speculative and much more terrifyingly real next steps. Also a big plot of the book is this neuro implant that helps sleep and between Elon’s neurolink and I saw a sleep/behavior study using neuro implants this also feels like yet another way the future is becoming present.

While to me the connections to privacy and personal freedom felt oh so timely, Lailami is also connecting to the carceral system, private prisons and how it is connected to modern slavery and a way to keep people trapped in the system.

She is also drawing on the experience post 9/11 of how POC and in Sara’s case Middle Eastern people specifically are policed and stereotyped by govt agencies. What would be considered minor discrepancies for white people become situations that have dire consequences for Black and brown people.

I loved this book and it was terrifying but ai will concede some parts I did not like. There is a part where Julie a white exec plays prisoner because they are using the dream data to try to sell people ideas in their sleep.

The idea of how late stage capitalism continues to develop is very interesting, way to real and worth exploring. This isn’t too far fetched to what we are already seeing with social media and our technology algorithms now. However this felt very misplaced in this story and I don’t feel like it was executed well.

I do think the ending was convenient. I don’t think it also depicts the reality of the story Lailami built for us so it left me with a bit of dissonance at the end. I do feel like the more accurate story was the endless cycle of the prison system and power or outright revolution and rebellion against the system.

I also will say this is a very internal book. There is plot but Sara is trying to understand if and why she is a threat to her family so she is thinking and rethinking about her dreams, her choices, her relationships to her family, husband, and kids. This constant replaying of her life is such a heightened self-awareness I can see where some would dislike it or make her feel unlikeable. This wasn’t really the case for me though. She is imprisoned with nothing but time to think about why especially since it remains a secret to her and this self examination felt real to her character and situation to me.

Overall I definitely recommend it if these topics intrigue you. To me the strengths in the exploration of these highly relevant topics and others I didn’t mention were well worth some of the places that

The Dream Hotel offers an intriguing glimpse into the complexities of identity and belonging. The narrative weaves through multiple characters, each with their own perspectives, which keeps the story evolving. However, at times, the multiple viewpoints can feel a bit scattered, making it harder to fully connect with any one character. The prose is elegant and thoughtful, but the pacing drags in places, affecting the overall immersion. It’s a decent read. Thought provoking with moments of brilliance, though it might not leave a lasting impression for everyone. Still, fans of literary fiction exploring cultural themes might find it worth a look.

Laila Lalami's newest novel, The Dream Hotel, fits snugly on a shelf between Philip K. Dick's short story, "The Minority Report," and George Orwell's classic, 1984.

After being stopped by airport security on her flight home from a work conference, Sara Hussein is detained and held in a retention center because her algorithmically-determined risk score is too high. The cause? Violent dreams that may be associated with a future crime against her husband. She isn't technically imprisoned but she's not allowed to leave. Instead, she's kept in a limbo state where her sentence is continuously extended while she provides free labor as a human captcha verifier and her demerits with overly zealous guards stack up.

Like many of its predecessors, this book asks but doesn't answer questions about data privacy, the prison industrial complex, and racial profiling. If you're looking for easy answers, this isn't the place. Instead, we have a thought exercise on what could happen as the natural conclusion of many of the forces that exist today: invasion into our private lives for profit, capitalist motives to keep people imprisoned, and unfair racial discrimination in policing.

The book's ending is a bit unsatisfying, in my opinion. It's neither the exciting, heroic conclusion we'd hope for in genre sci-fi, nor the hopeless despair we see at end of most classic literature. (Let's be real, I love the classics, but no one gets a happy ending.) I left the book feeling like the story was sort of pointless from the perspective of our characters. With the way the plot was escalating, I don't even think it would have been hard to pull off a great conclusion. That said, it was an interesting premise and if you come into the book with slightly lower expectations, you might it enjoy it more than I did.

Unfortunately, this dystopian novel is less speculative fiction than actually just a mirror of technofascism in the U.S. as it’s shaping up in 2025. The first person narrative highlights the isolation the main character feels and is broken up with corporate and carceral documents that flesh out the surveillance state. It was sometimes too much tell and not enough show for me, but well worth it for a book with a message as important as this: freedom is not in isolated comfort sold to you by tech corporations, it comes from real life community and collective power.

This novel had the potential to be a powerful commentary on systemic injustice, but it never quite delivered the emotional or narrative weight it promised. It raises timely and provocative themes, state surveillance, algorithmic bias, and the mechanics of incarceration, but often does so in ways that feel overly literal or forced. The premise of using dreams as predictive evidence was intriguing but strained credibility, and while issues of race and profiling were acknowledged, they weren't explored with the depth they deserved. The emotional core of the story was lacking, with characters that felt more like mouthpieces for ideas than fully realized people. Despite a few compelling threads, the story left me more intellectually curious than truly moved.
Thank you to the the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC which I read in exchange for my honest review.

The Black Mirror fan in me ateeeeee this book up. The world was eerily realistic and scary (aka why it reminded me of Black Mirror...like hello why aren't we seeing our own red flags) but for once I felt like I cared more about the world itself than the characters. I am not sure if that makes sense... I also wanted a little bit more from the ending. I did really enjoy how thrilling this story was and was captivated by the fast paced plot.

The premise of this book was so promising. Peoples’ dreams are being scanned and algorithm makes predictions on whether a crime will be committed based on at least 200 datapoints. It gave me vibes of Minority Report and Person of Interest.

Unfortunately it didn’t pan out as I had hoped. So much of the book was spent between flashbacks and her time in prison that it was hard to tie them to the plot itself.
Eventually it came together, but I came away more relieved that it was over and that at least for now I don’t have to worry about anyone else knowing the content of my dreams.

Thanks to Pantheon and NetGalley for an ARC of this book.

A thought-provoking dystopian thriller that’s chillingly relevant—though a few areas could have been stronger.

Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel imagines a near-future world (2039) where technology invades even the most private sanctum—our dreams. When Sara Hussein, a historian and mother of twins, returns to L.A., she’s detained by the Risk Assessment Administration based not on actions, but on data from her implant about her potential for violent thoughts. She’s taken to a retention center disguised as a “women’s facility,” where she’s held indefinitely under the guise of risk management

I had mixed feelings on this story. It felt so confusing at times but at other times it seemed I was reading a different story. Overall I did enjoy it but it was slow in some places and a bit confusing in others. Overall I enjoyed reading it despite the ending feeling a bit rushed. I will reread it and see if clicks with me more the second time around.