This book was really a dream as the name implied. I loved following the twists and turns of the plot and really enjoyed the characters and the way they all interacted. I’ll definitely be reading this author’s work in the future.

I couldn’t put this eerie, dystopian novel down! The Dream Hotel takes place in a world where AI technology is expanding rapidly, and it centers on Sara Hussein, a new mom and wife who’s wrongly accused of a pre-crime she didn’t commit. To help her juggle her chaotic life, Sara gets a neuroprosthetic implant that boosts her sleep, allowing her to function on just 5 hours a night—perfect for managing twins, her home duties, and her career. Sounds great, right? But there’s a catch. By agreeing to the device’s terms, Sara unknowingly gives permission for her dreams to be monitored, sold, and worse—used against her. If a dream raises any red flags, it’s considered “pre-crime,” and a deep dive into her life is triggered in Al algorithm, searching for more evidence of an impending crime. Those deemed a threat are sent to retention centers, which, in reality, are just high-tech prisons. This novel really gets under your skin and makes you think about the line between privacy and control in our ever-evolving tech-driven world.

“She wants to be free, and what is freedom of not wrestling of the self from the gaze of others, including her own? Life is meant to be lived, to be seized for all the beauty and joy to be wrung out of it; it isn’t meant to be contained and inventoried for the sake of safety”.

It’s honestly kind of terrifying to think about how much of our personal information is out there—and how close we are to living in a full-blown surveillance state. With AI growing so fast, that fear only gets worse. Laila Lalami’s writing is gripping and beautifully crafted; she really nails the idea that digital technology isn’t just invasive, but also a major threat to personal freedom. It’s a chilling reminder of how much control we could be handing over without even realizing it.

Special thanks to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, author Laila Lalami, and NetGalley for a free copy of this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'm definitely in the minority here but I felt like this book overpromised and underdelivered. The 'new resident' point was anticlimactic and a tiny plot point, even if the summary would have you believe otherwise. The middle portion dragged and the ending felt rushed and weirdly muted on its commentary on surveillance if the rest of the book was an indictment.

This was a very interesting dystopian take on the near future, where dreams and thoughts are monitored for possible crimes. It was engaging and easy to get lost in. Thanks to the publisher and NeGalley for the ARC!

Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for the eARC of The Dream Hotel in exchange for an honest review.

The Dream Hotel is a chilling examination of the surveillance state, the incarceration industrial complex, and capitalism and even though the book is billed as a dystopian, the setting of the novel feels very much too close for comfort.

We follow the harrowing experience of Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American archivist whose unpleasant interaction with customs officers at LAX turned into a nightmare when she is sentenced to retention by the government agency Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) which has predicted that she will commit a crime against her husband. As a retainee, Sara finds herself at the mercy of Madison, a private retention center run by corporation Safe-X, where her chances of freedom depend on the whims of the complicated bureaucratic system full of arbitrary rules designed to keep Sara and her fellow retainees in a perpetual miserable, profit-maximizing existence inside Safe-X.

It is definitely a depressing and rage-inducing read. There are many moments where I found myself needing to stop the book and take a breath to calm myself down at the numerous injustices facing Sara and her fellow retainees at Madison. While the resolution at the end of the book is not the just desert that one may be expecting, I am grateful for the message of solidarity and organized action in the face of corporate greed. A theme that is very prevalent during this time of renewed union strength alongside repressive corporate crackdown on workers in the US. The hopeful tone at the end of the book of course does not resolve or erase all of the injustices, but it marks the beginning of something that can be greater, which is perhaps the best gift Laila Lalami gives us.

Like many dystopian novels, the horrors depicted in The Dream Hotel are very real. Perhaps the exact technology used is still thankfully not a reality just yet, but the issues of our willingly sign away our privacy and rights to tech companies promising “convenience”, to the growing surveillance state promising “safety and security”, and the ugly, exploitative, and dehumanizing nature of for-profit prisons are integral aspects of our society. And I appreciate Laila Lalami drawing attention to these realities through her story. I hope The Dream Hotel will begin to open the door to these conversations, no matter how difficult people may find them.

This provocative gem of a dystopia is not just terrifyingly real but also implicates capitalism while warning of the dangers of a seemingly advantageous police state. To combat the huge increase in mass murders, the legislature enacts a law to detain persons that are deemed likely to commit violent crimes by virtue of examining not just behaviors but their dreams. These retention centers are run by a variety of Nurse Ratchett types. A young mother who is not the best at keeping her mouth shut, gets detained.

I can’t say more about the plot without spoilers. Suffice it to say it is a propulsive, fascinating read with an extraordinarily satisfying ending.

Thank you to Net Galley and Pantheon for this advanced readers copy.

WOW! This book was fascinating. I could not stop reading. There were many times I wanted to skip to the end just so I knew how it would end because I was so anxious and invested in the outcome of the main character. Loved this book so much!

In a society where tech has advanced to the point of “predicting” crimes before they happen, a system of surveillance monitors people’s dreams and prescribes risk scores, leading to the detention of individuals for crimes they MIGHT commit.

Sometimes with the on-the-nose commentary it can read like straight up horror. I’ve been trying to get all my feelings sorted but really this book drained me. I am a sucker for anything that has to do with surveillance, tech, and different forms of our future so this was basically a guaranteed 4or5 star going in. I immediately vibed with the prose, pace, & tone of the novel but the back to back, so-close-to-real-life was haunting. Obviously not reading the dreams part but the use of AI and our data and our relationships and our climate and prison system… I could go on and on.

I am frazzled in the best way and all I know is if someone could see my dreams… my sentence would be 3830394 days & probably more.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for the opportunity to read and review this title.

This is a hauntingly eerie dystopian tale that doesn’t stretch the limits at all of believability. A mix of Minority Report, Black Mirror, and Orange is the new black, it details a not-too-distant future where crime prevention and technological surveillance are at the extreme; even your dreams are monitored and even the smallest part of your dream can land you in a facility for “pre crimes”. This book also reminded me of another great dystopia with similar elements, “The School for Good Mothers”.
This is a fate that befalls our protagonist Sara, a wife and mother of twins. Sara is detained after a work trip and jailed in a facility with other women who have been arrested. Racism, sexism, and misogyny run rampant at the facility, and Sara does her best to plead her case and also make friends with the other inmates. Between chapters we get snippets of the facility Bureaucracy, which I thought brought a lot to the story and really showed how unfairly Sara and the rest of the women were being treated; just like prison, they’re not seen as human beings and are just seen as objects. There are multiple references to today’s major tech and social media, with their names changed but it’s fairly obvious who they’re referencing.
So remember kids: always read the fine print in agreements

This is a new release to watch!! I read this gripping novel within 48 hours, spellbound as if in a fever dream. The world in The Dream Hotel is beautifully constructed, and Lalami deploys believable, lovable characters to illustrate larger themes about technological surveillance, AI, capitalism, and the prison industrial complex--all issues that are incredibly pertinent to our world. I was fully immersed in the novel and felt utterly invested in the wellbeing of the main character and her safety. The experience was so immersive that I knew myself to be in the hands of a masterful storyteller. That, as the novel progressed, it grew harder and harder to discern the dream sequences from the character's lived reality is a testament to this.

I have only a few, nitpicky issues with the book: there is some mixed media interjections in the central narrative, as well as one divergence via a second narrator. I don't think those parts served the book as well as they could have, and some opened up loose ends that were never tied up, which bothered me. Conversely, I felt the ending in the main narrative a little too tidy and spelled out, and though I know this is likely an unpopular opinion, I would have appreciated more ambiguity in it. Finally, the book centers a mother who is abruptly separated from her 13-month-old twins. As someone with a 14-month-old, this hit close to home, and I found that a more nuanced and dimensional depiction of maternal longing and guilt would have better served the novel.

Overall, this book is a feat, and one that I will be thinking about for days to come. So looking forward to its release!

I have only read one other book by this author, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and loved it. Not sure why I never returned to read more of her work, but I finally had the opportunity, and she did not disappoint!

This novel is a dystopian one set in the very near future. Insomnia has been cured by a brain implant that captures and analyze dream data. This data has been co-opted to prevent crime before it occurs. Lalami brings to life a system of detention under the slimmest of premises and then does a great job of specifically detailing the likely fallouts and abuses that emerge.

It's very scary because it feels so realistic, as if the scenarios in the book could happen in the next 5 years. It's very Black Mirror-ish, and I'm a huge fan of that television series.

My only quibble was really with the ending. It felt a bit foreshortened to me. I was left wanting more.

All in all, The Dream Hotel is very strong when it comes to pacing, dialogue, a very interesting premise, and well drawn characters. I normally am not a fan of dreams in literature, but when they were used here, the device actually worked well.

The positive is that I would check out Lalami's other works. The book centers on tech and how that can impact daily life ( I know original lol). Specifically, it asks, "What if crime can be predicted and prevented by establishing a jail system? If you ever had yourself or a loved one in jail (or you can even read about the highway robbery) you will appreciate the spotlight on the dollar industry that lies in the complex of imprisoning people. Jail is punishment but it is also just another form of big business and this story paints a great picture of a woman named Sarah who just on the whim of new technology finds herself in an institution, that's a prison or jail although since she hasn't committed any crime they cant technically call to that. But the treatment by all involved must not have gotten that memo.

I would definitely give this book and the rest of the author's back catalog if you are new to her a chance, I know I will.

I really loved the concept of this book, and it was a quick engaging read. I saw another review say that this would make for a great book club option and I completely agree - there's so much to talk about and the subject itself sparks a lot of great conversation. Ultimately, I wanted a little more from the story - I had trouble fully connecting and getting sucked in when it came down to it. That being said, there's a lot to love here and would definitely recommend picking up a copy. Thanks NetGalley for the ARC!

TY for the ARC...interesting concepts...(surveillance et al especially these days) however, the writing seemed too disjointed to me. As a frequent reader of dystopian lit this one was a miss. I did not feel connected to Sara nor did her behavior warrant my sympathy for her plight.

This is my first Laila Lalami book and The Dream Hotel has me looking for more by this author. This novel could have been an episode of Black Mirror and a good one at that.

The story follows Sara Hussein, an archivist at the Getty Museum in LA, who was detained unexpectedly at LAX when returning from a work conference. She was flagged as a potential threat to her husband and then sent to a detention facility to help watch her. The reason she was flagged was due to her having dreams, which are being tracked by a company, that centered around killing her husband. In the world of this novel, there is a technology that was developed to "help" improve the crime rate by catching criminals before they do anything harmful. They just get detained and are supposedly not in "prison".

I couldn't put this book down. This was a bleak dystopian sci-fi that brought a lot of thought about the legal and prison systems, technology, privacy, and even the struggles of immigrants assimilating in this country and dealing with racial profiling (especially at airports). It was very interesting how people gave up their privacy (to have their dreams monitored) to have a peaceful, restful sleep. A real thought-provoking read.

Laila Lalami the writer you are! My first sit down with her as an authour and while this is my favourite genre, my bias typically works against me with the highest of hopes and the biggest let downs. Fortunately for me, Lalami did not let me down.

In a not so distant future, technology is “helping” to curve the crime rate by picking up “criminals” before committing the actual crime they’re being retained for. It’s “not” prison, right? Through heavy monitoring, big brother is watching, even through your dreams.

As a lover of scifi, apocalypse, societal monitoring, philosophical and psychological exploration, I found Lalami hit all of my wants and needs while still maintaining a solid story without bouncing all over the place. We follow one main character throughout and while there was one perspective switch mid story that had me confused then quickly had me jaw dropping loudly, everything was well honed and succinct.

There were so many things packed into this tight story that would make Kazou Ishiguro and fans alike pleased. While this sparks hints of my love for things like Black Mirror, it’s less doom filled while still being entirely bleak. I know it’s unlikely to happen but I’d absolutely love for a bunch of other stories set in this world of new characters experiences. We don’t get much of anything in the outside world, and this is a necessary choice for the book, but Lalami creates a luscious world I just seem brimming with potential.

This is a 5 star all around book. It really reminded me of the school for good mothers - but even better (and that was a 5 star read for me). Even at the end, it showed how the stay impacted her in the real world. all of this was amazing!!

The Dream Hotel is a brillant, pacey book that is bound to be a favorite for many readers in 2025. Laila Lalami weaves dystopian fiction with political commentary throughout her novel. She tells the story of a woman named Sara who is in confinement for a crime that she is "likely" to commit based on algorithmic data. Sara's struggles with the bureaucracy while in a female detention are frustratingly realistic, and her sentence is stretched from weeks to months. As a new parent eager to reunite with her twins, Sara must figure out an ever changing system of rules and write-ups in order to clear her record, and be released. 

While many of the elements of technology that Lalami dreams up are futuristic, they point back to current trends in surveillance and our culture's desire for AI to ease the burdens of decision-making. More than any other social issue, I think The Dream Hotel does an excellent job of pointing a finger at for-profit prisons. The women's labor at the detention center but sustains and expands the facility, all the while detainees are expected to fork over large sums for simple things, like shampoo or a phone call. The lack of justice echoed throughout the book is an excellent opportunity for discussion and reflection. 

A huge thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for my honest review. I look forward to reading other reviews once The Dream Hotel is released in March!

I really enjoyed this book. It kept me engaged and it only took a few days to read. I think this is going to be a good book club option for several clubs. I plan recommending to my book friends and I look forward to reading more by this author.

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. In the slightly distant future, you can guarantee a great night sleep, every night, but, in exchange, you give access to your dreams. The company can not sell your dreams, but can provide them to law enforcement. Thus begins retention centers where random people are held when their dreams point to possible future crimes. This always fascinating novel follows Sara as she is separated from her husband and infant twins and starts a nightmare that seems to have no end.