The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel

glass hotel

official blurb

From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, a captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it.Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it's the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent's half-brother, Paul, scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: "Why don't you swallow broken glass." Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship. Weaving together the lives of these characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.

I was so excited to get my hands on this book. I've only read Station Eleven by Mandel, but I loved it. In fact it is probably my most widely recommended books.  However if you're reading this review and you're still in the throws of coronavirus- now is not the time to read Station Eleven.  But feel free to still go over and read my review of it! :)

Now let's get started with this review.  I decided to format this one a little bit differently because why the heck not.  Here are some of my notes I wrote down while reading this beautifully written book.  You can decide when you read them, what my rating should be. Because I still haven't totally decided what this book should be rated.

• 55 pages in and it's really confusing. There are seemingly random numbers on the pages throughout the chapters. The chapters are written from multiple characters perspectives. There are a ton of names to keep track of and I can't remember them all. I keep flipping back and forth to see if it's a name from a previous section and it rarely is.

• There's a girl named Vincent. Who names a girl Vincent? It has taken me at least 50 pages to remember that Vincent is a girl.

• Over 90 pages in and no real plot yet. They keep alluding to the plot but not much of anything has happened. I'm enjoying the journey though.

• I don't know anything about pyramid schemes other than people making jokes about Young Living. Which I think is more MLM but honestly don't know. After reading this I'm still completely confused about it. I think it needed to be actually explained to the laymen better. Page 205, an actual explanation! Yay! (And I actually even followed the explanation with "newborn mom brain" working against me!)

• Page 240 before the storyline of "the woman who disappeared off of the boat." This whole time I thought it was referring to... well to someone else (I don't want to spoil that) It wasn't...

• I think this book should have a different title. Maybe Ghost Stories. You decide what you think when you finish it and let me know what you think the title should be. I feel like Ghost Stories is a pretty strong contender.

I would recommend reading this on a Kindle. Like station eleven, only in writing style, there are roughly 7000 names in this book. Okay, you got me, not 7000. I have a flair for the dramatic. But there were a lot of names. And if you have a memory like mine, a Kindle will be your best friend for the X-ray feature.

After finishing this book I have NO idea what to rate it. I didn't feel fulfilled with the ending and it actually seemed like it was a two different stories written in the same book. That's not to say that the stories didn't converge in some sense but... Not enough for it to make sense to me.

I HAVE to mention that there are little easter eggs in this book if you've read her other books.  I've only read Station Eleven, like I mentioned, but I've heard that some characters from her other books made their way into this one as well.  That's right, keep your eyes peeled and you might see some of your old friends from Station Eleven in this one!  

When I say I really enjoyed the writing style, I mean it!  Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

-"Why were the righteous so often irritating?"

-"One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid."

-"It's always possible to fail to know the people closest to us."

-"That's what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money"

-"Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness. Almost no one."

Okay it's time for me to rate this thing.  I know I won't be widely recommending it like Station Eleven.  It really had a slow but steady pace... which in fairness I think quite a lot of adult fiction has this pacing.  It seemed like different stories were all jammed into one book.  The characters weren't very likable (I think this is a trend for Mandel that she writes "realistic" characters.  I put that in quotes because I hope that if you met me in real life I would be likable and I am also a real person.  So with all of that in mind... I think I'm going to officially rate it:

3.75 our of 5

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