This book will make you angry, and if it doesn't, it should.
Alarmingly prescient, The Dream Hotel shows the knife's edge of navigating a system designed against you, and how easy it is to slip.
Sara finds herself in a women's retention facility (statedly NOT a prison, but if it walks like a duck...) after her risk score inexplicably rises above the accepted threshold.
Guilty until proven innocent by an algorithm that is actively searching for things she could be guilty of, Sara spends her days trying to move unseen in a heightened surveillance state, and her nights escaping into dreams that can be used as evidence against her.

"The data doesn't lie."
"It doesn't tell the truth, either."

I found myself needing to take breaks throughout reading this because, while it is an excellent read, it can feel a bit hopeless, given that our current affairs are but a hair's breadth away from the book's reality.
Hopeless and angry.
And while us readers are allowed to get viscerally mad for Sara-- frown, scoff, swear aloud at d*ckwad Hinton-- she has to simmer her rage, keep it silently roiling. I think that tangible contrast between us made this story that much more poignant.

Also, Sharp Jello is a great band name.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Thank you Pantheon and NetGalley for this ARC! Always a pleasure to receive a free book in exchange for my honest review.

I was super excited to see that I was approved for this book! The premise 100% gives me Black Mirror vibes and I am HERE for it! Which is why I am so sad to say that this book fell flat for me. I wanted to love it so much......this is a skip for me.


1/5

Holly Collins

Thank you for providing the advanced copy of Dream Hotel. This was a uniquely thought-provoking read, simultaneously terrifying and yet unsettlingly imaginable.

Set in a near-future America where dreams are under surveillance, the story begins with Sara's detention at the airport. An algorithm, analyzing her dream data, predicts she will harm her husband, leading to her confinement in a retention center. Here, she joins other "dreamers," predominantly women, all striving to prove their innocence. As minor infractions lead to extended stays, Sara confronts the oppressive system and the powerful tech companies controlling their lives. The novel compellingly questions the balance between convenience and freedom, and the very essence of identity under constant surveillance.

The pacing of the book felt somewhat restrained. I honestly anticipated a dramatic climax that would challenge and potentially dismantle the deeply disturbing system presented. However, the narrative remained largely focused on a personal level, and the conclusion didn't quite reach the explosive point I had envisioned. While I was immensely intrigued by the world-building and the potential it suggested, I found the middle section somewhat slow, and the ending, for me personally, lacked complete satisfaction. Nevertheless, Dream Hotel remains a very interesting and relevant read that is undoubtedly worth the reader's time.

This book was a wonderful commentary on how our thoughts and every move could become data to be used and taken advantage of by authorities. How might we prevent crime, and might extreme prevention methods, such as that in The Dream Hotel, challenge our humanity?

I found this story compelling and enticing and the events in this book extend the idea and action of profiling, which happens in society every day. This is a great example of what happens when it's taken too far. Then when you are incarcerated or held against your will, the goalposts of innocence move. I thought the book could have been shorter to get the same point across, but overall this is an incredible novel.

I loved the concept of this book and felt it had such high potential, but the execution fell flat for me. I couldn’t connect with any of the characters, the story was soooo slow, and in the end it felt like nothing really even happened. So sad that I didn't love this one!

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC.

Thanks NetGalley, Pantheon and Laila Lalami for allowing me to read The Dream Hotel before it’s March release.

This was a bit disappointing for me, I really looked forward to this read and it just felt short. I felt no connection to the characters and I just it read just meh. So many plot holes, it was almost a DNF.
Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon publishing for the ARC of The Dream Hotel in exchange for an honest review.
2 STAR

Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel presents a chilling near-future scenario where even dreams are monitored by AI-driven government agencies. The novel follows Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American woman detained by the Risk Assessment Administration, a federal agency that uses biometric data to predict potential crimes. Though Sara has committed no wrongdoing, her “risk score” is deemed high enough to warrant confinement in a retention center, where she and other detainees must prove their innocence.

Lalami masterfully constructs a world that feels eerily plausible, drawing on contemporary concerns about surveillance, predictive policing, and corporate exploitation. The novel’s structure—interspersed with official reports, transcripts, and bureaucratic jargon—adds to the realism, making Sara’s predicament all the more unsettling. I felt Lalami’s vision of this book was so unique her, offering a fresh critique of the ways technology can be weaponized against personal autonomy.

If you enjoy speculative fiction with a sharp social critique, *The Dream Hotel* is a must-read. It’s a novel that lingers in the mind long after the final page, prompting reflection on the balance between security and personal liberty

In a routine flight for work, a woman is initially kept in interrogation by security and moved to confinement with other women. The detained women score high on a personal and societal risk test. As such, The Dream Hotel is a dystopian, maybe magical realism story.

If I can’t get into a book for some reason by about 30%, I DNF it. Also, I have never not finished a gifted ARC. Unfortunately, I had to DNF The Dream Hotel at the 30% or so mark because of recent occurrences covered by the news. I normally love a satirical story or even a story that borders the horror genre to emphasize true events in time. However, the increased news coverage of the American government detaining illegal migrants and legal residents mirrored the plot too closely. For my mental health, I had to put The Dream Hotel down. Maybe I will circle back to it at a later time when the story doesn’t feel so heartbreakingly real.

My thanks to NetGalley and the Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an ARC. Since I DNF this book, I opted not to share it on my GoodReads account. I think readers should pick up The Dream Hotel because of its important message. However, it was too personal for me, and I don't want my review to deter others from Lalami's newest.

This was a 4.5 star read rounded up. I really loved this story and what it says about our technological world in a near future. At the start we meet Sara as she is being retained because of her risk score. She is sent to a retention center (“not a jail”) where she will be observed and monitored until her risk can be assessed. As her stay continues to get extended we see how terrible society can be and how banding together can help humans make it through.

I liked a lot about this book. It wasn’t perfect but was very eye-opening. I really loved the aspects of community explored throughout. I liked the near dystopian quality of the story and I really liked how realistic it felt.

A woman named Sara is detained at the airport on her way home from a business trip. It's determined that she is a threat to her husband. In short order, Sara finds herself at a former school turned "retention center" along with other women who are deemed "dangerous". This is the gist of The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami's sixth book.

Although the reader glimpses others' lives, the story unfolds mainly though Sara's eyes. As a protagonist, she's a homerun: immediately likeable and easy to empathize with. There's a lot of "everyday" female experiences that Lalami also allows us to see and experience through Sara: micro-aggressions in a facility run by (mainly) men, sexualizing the female body, the tension of needing to be seen as a certain way in order to be credible|liked|"pass" as normal, an imbalance of power in relationships and how labor and care work is divided up at home. I felt myself nodding, groaning, fuming and being embarassed for Sara. That's good writing. Other characters - the guards, other detainees, Sara's husband - are realistic, move the story forward and add to the development of Sara's character.

I hesitate to say the book is "compulsively readable" but I stayed up later than I wanted reading it! I was attached to the story, horrified by the events unfolding and cared what happened to Sara. The Dream Hotel is not only propulsive but feels tense and current. In some ways this book is more alarming than other "classic" dystopian reads (The Handmaid's Tale or a Fahrenheit 451) or those on a "best" list. Sara's United States doesn't feel like a distant future that our kids will have to deal with. The theme of overreaching technology and life in a world run by an algorithm seems real and highly possible.

In the afterward, Lalami says there's a space of 6ish years between when she started The Dream Hotel (2014) and when she finished it (during the pandemic). For me, this gap explains the challenges I did have with this book. Loose ends (characters who don't propel the story, dialogue / observations that adds nothing to the story, not filler exactly but loops that aren't fully explored or closed tightly) an ending that seems not quite right / anti climactic and an overall sense of rushing through the final 30ish pages of the book. It seems to me that Lalami lost her ooomph a bit when she came back to the book. I wonder if others noticed the same?

I recommend The Dream Hotel to readers who liked The School for Good Mothers; gravitate toward dystopian; notice the uneasy nexus between control and "harmless" technology.

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an ARC of this book!

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an ARC of this book! The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami was such an engrossing read. I would consider this sci-fi dystopian with an important message for us today. The government has figured out a way to predict crime, and in the interest of “safety” they will detain anyone flagged as likely to commit a crime. Detain is a key word here, anyone detained is practically jailed, with any misconduct extending detainment. Sara, our protagonist, was detained going through the airport. Her dreams, along with other data points, have deemed her a risk to her husband. In a world where surveillance is growing, where we put cameras in our own homes and carry a tiny microphone and camera with us everywhere, where we send our DNA off for analyzing, or track our periods, we should really be thinking about the implications. How will our data be used? Already airports are using facial recognition software, when will it go too far? I enjoyed this book, I will be thinking about it for quite some time.

It took me a little while to get into this book, because I'm a mother of two young girls, and I really have to prep myself for books that involve moms being away from their kids, or any other traumatic circumstance. But once I pushed past that and got into the meat of the story, I started to enjoy it.

This is a near-future sort of sci-fi story about people who are detained because of crimes that MIGHT commit. And they are found because the government monitors everyone's dreams. Once you are in, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to get out, and the reader gets the distinct feeling that there is no actual system in place for release.

This was an interesting one, though I can't say I would recommend it to many readers I know. It is a tough read for emotional reasons, and also because it seems like it's just around the corner in real life. And I can only take so much of that when I'm reading to escape.

The Dream Hotel was one of those books where the concept totally hooked me, but the execution just didn’t land the way I hoped. It wanted to be deep and dystopian and thought-provoking—and sometimes it was!—but other times it felt like it was trying too hard to be profound instead of letting the story unfold naturally. I didn’t hate it (the writing is objectively solid and the themes are super timely), but I was kind of bored and frustrated for a good chunk of it. It’s giving "literary Black Mirror with a side of slow burn existential dread," and that might work for some people—but for me, it was just meh.

This book showed such promise. The first 25% really captured my attention. Then, the author spent the next 70% in a morass of the confined citizens. The author states in the afterward that she started this book in 2014, finishing it during the pandemic. It just feels like she lost her juice when she came back to it. I would give it 3.5 stars if allowed. Thanks to NetGalley for a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

This book was incredible! It was such an interesting concept, especially in today’s political climate, very Handmaids tale, a little too close to reality, but enthralling!

A stark and terrifying dystopian novel about surveillance capitalism, private prisons, and the blurry line between legal guilt and subjective innocence.

The Dream Hotel is set in a near-future world that looks very much like our present (with a few sci-fi elements). Mass surveillance, and the network of data it generates, is used to calculate risk scores for individuals. But it's not just data on your words, actions, posts, and acquaintances: new neural implants, marketed by big tech as a way to help people rest better, become an engine for mass surveillance of dreams. The main character, Sara Hussein, is detained at LAX for troubling dreams, and with little else to go on, she is incarcerated in a facility for fellow dangerous-dreaming women. With every small act of resistance, the detainees' time is extended.

This novel is (unfortunately) extremely relevant to our current moment, but that also makes it an extremely compelling read.

Thank you Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor + NetGalley for the ARC!

After seeing this title everywhere on social media, I had pretty high hopes, and I was a little let down. Granted, it might not have been the best idea to read this directly after finishing Severance s2, since both stories have very similar vibes. The first half had me pretty hooked, but the last half felt kind of empty, something was missing but I can't quite put my finger on it. I think I was expecting a more climactic wrap-up, or at least more answers to the questions that were proposed throughout the story. I would still recommend this to friends who were looking for something mysterious that touches on the current work climate, and look forward to other works from Lalami in the future!

The future seems all too near in this speculative sci-fi novel, The Dream Hotel, by Laila Lalami. Risk Assessment Administration agents pull our protagonist, Sara, aside on her return to LAX from a work conference aboard. In the near future, dream data will be harnessed as evidence of the dreamer's intent to commit a crime. In this instance, Sara committing a crime against her husband. For his safety, she must be held in a detention center for at least 21 days with other dreamers.

Lalami paints a really vivid picture of what could be around the corner when it comes to the future of AI and the power of algorithms. Here lies the danger of such technologies being used as government surveillance. Really, how much control do we really have against algorithmic policing? Additionally, The Dream Hotel offers strong social commentary on contemporary issues, such as the perceived threat of criminal activity because of the color of your skin, the existing privatized prison system, and climate change.

All this makes for a bit of an anxious read. It felt a bit of a drag in the middle and the dreamer's friendships felt perhaps a little flat. For me, I think the main disappointment was the end. I was hoping for an ending that packed more of a punch. But certainly, overall, an insight read on a very plausible topic.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book definitely gave me some anxiety. While it is supposed to be scientific and futuristic, some of the technology is available today, which made this storyline a bit eerie. What happened in this book could possibly happen in the not-so-distant future with the current development of AI technology. While reading the book, there were times where I found it difficult to distinguish between what was a dream and what was real, which was probably the author’s intent. I felt that this book was a bit technical and had a lot of details, which required me to really pay attention. I did enjoy the story, but there were a few times where I found the storyline a bit difficult to follow. Also, there seemed to be a few loose ends that I hoped would be tied up or clarified, but it did not happen by the end of the book. As for the narration, it was good except for the chapters that were e-mails or memos. The continued repetition of date, timestamp, case number, “to” and “from”, in addition to the audible beeps when the redacted CRO’s name was read, made those chapters unbearable to listen to. I had to stop the audio and read the ebook for those chapters. The book kept me on the edge of my seat waiting to see what was going to happen to Sara. I empathized with her situation, particularly given that she was the mother of young children. I also felt sorry for her husband, he had to take on the full-time task of being a single parent, but there were times when he was not my favorite character. I have to say that there were quite a few characters in this book that were not likable. Maybe that’s another reason why it took me a little while to finish reading this book. I would probably recommend this book to readers who really enjoy science fiction or fiction filled with futuristic technology. I did appreciate all the local Southern California references, especially the craziness of the Santa Ana Winds and the potential of wildfires. I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that Laila Lalami was a distinguished creative writing professor at a local university.