The more I read from Emily St. John Mandel, the less I know what the expect from the plot. This unusual, captivating novel about greed, family, and identity has fully realized characters, mystical settings, and familiar consequences that combine for another unforgettable outing. As much as the author surprises me, what I have come to expect is another novel to love and recommend.

Having enjoyed Station Eleven, I was excited to dive into this book. The Glass Hotel is very character driven, while the story isn't fast paced and full of twist and turns, it is extremely readable.

I enjoyed the stories of different people and how their lives progressed, but this book was just so disjointed. I just felt like I wasn't reading a cohesive story and each one, was separate from the others.

I heard The author speak virtually last night and now can’t wait to finish. The inventiveness of the characters is great

I read half and did not finish. It didn’t sweep me away like I had hoped. I was excited to get an egalley of the new book from the amazing author of Station Eleven. I was disappointed.

I always find myself thinking of Emily St. John Mandel's books long after I finish, and this was no exception. I was expecting the shadows of Bernie Madoff, but this dug much deeper, into the hearts and minds of all those involved. We are all haunted in one way or another, as this book rightly shows us.

Contemporary Fiction | Adult
First up, this is nothing like Station Eleven. I was a bit hesitant when I read the description – a woman falls overboard, a remote hotel on Vancouver Island, a drug-addicted brother, and a Ponzi scheme. And yet, Mandel is such a powerful writer, who could resist? In her post-pandemic Station Eleven, she gave us this powerful line that resonates so painfully today: “Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” Ain’t it the truth. Sigh. So back to this book. It opens as a woman falls overboard, then shifts back in time to a graffiti incident involving a grieving young teen. Over the course of the novel, we learn about Vincent, a female bartender, her half-brother Paul who is a drug-addicted musician, a rich hotel-owner, and a shipping magnate.
The Hotel Caiette, a boat-in resort on north Vancouver Island, is the point of intersection for all of them, and in a sense, its raison-d’etre is the very essence of this novel: “Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel.” It’s this glass boundary between us and them that Mandel explores – the different worlds we humans live in. I envision it as layers of maps – kids see their neighbourhood as a series of trails and routes to their friends’ homes, their school, the candy store. Adults see the same space as an ordered grid. The very poor walk the streets and see injustice. Mandel takes that idea of one earth/many worlds, and creates a story of moral quandaries that shifts back and forth between the world of money, the world of drugs, the world of hard work, the world of dreams, and even, oddly interesting, the world of international shipping. In weaving the story, somehow she makes it all fascinating, giving readers food for thought about the worlds we choose to inhabit, and see, and ignore. You’ll find yourself examining how you see the world around you, and what you choose to ignore. It’s unsettling, of course, a bit shameful for many of us. Perhaps that glass wall is not just for the rich….
My thanks to Knopf Doubleday for the digital reading copy provided through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Grand Forks residents will find a copy at the Grand Forks & District Public Library, in print and e-book formats.
More discussion and reviews of this novel: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45754981

I love her writing. I care about her characters. She sets the scenes so well, I read this one in a day. I couldn't put it down, and found that I've thought about it many times since.

💫what a beautiful work of art this novel was!💫 I love this authors writing style and the way she was able to tell this story was extraordinary. I’ve seen mixed reviews on this book and I can see why it would fall a little short for some people. The way this novel is written can be confusing at times. It jumps around timelines, introduces new characters often and switches locations a lot. It doesn’t really follow a typical story timeline, there isn’t really a “peak” in the story and at first it’s hard to tell what the book is even about (lol). But the way it all tied together in the end was so beautiful. Emily St.John Mandel depicts greed, guilt and regret so well throughout this book. I thought she captured the way humans act and think so well and really displayed the ping pong effect of human action. For me, it was such a joy to read and a book than I plan to re read in the future! 4.5/5⭐️ .
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Thank you so much to @aaknopf for the review copy of this book!

"The Glass Hotel" has a lot of things that could add up to a less than satisfying read: a major storyline involving financial fraud (boring), multiple narrators and jumping around in time, often in the same paragraph (confusing). This is not the case here, as Emily wound her tale in a way that was compelling, easy to follow (for the most part, at least; there is one section where the narrator used "we" and never did figure out which character was speaking), and gave enough insight into the many characters that each perspective was welcomed.

*I received an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher. All opinions in this review are my own*

If this book kept on the path it was on at the beginning of the story, I think I would have loved it. I did still like it.. but it started with the story of siblings Paul and Vincent.. I was hooked on them.. but then the middle of the book went in all these directions about what Happened to
Vincent as an adult and the people in her life and Paul vanished from the story. The ending did circle it all back but the back and forth time lines and points of view had me losing a bit of interest by then.

Emily St. John Mandel delivers another book of solid fiction after Station Eleven. Lots of interesting characters, different perspective, mysterious happenings, and maybe ghosts. My only reservation is sometimes I would have liked to get to know some of the characters better - like Paul, the main character's brother. He is prominent right away and then sporadic afterwards. But a good book overall,

What a fascinating read! Based on a Ponzi scheme, and inevitably invoking the misdeeds of Madoff, it is a book about conflicting emotions. Greed and avarice, at its worst, are intertwined with love and compassion.
This is my first introduction to the author and I can immediately see why she is so beloved. No person in this book is all good or bad, although it would have been easy to paint them as such. What's especially creative is the manner in which the author makes you contemplate that gray area for her characters.
The writing is surreal and real at the same time. The author's creative manner of writing transposes the reality of deception and deceit into much more than that.

I enjoyed the multiple time lines and perspectives of this novel, but was not as drawn into the characters or events as in St. John Mandel's previous title, "Station Eleven". I felt the character's fell flat and their personalities were predictable, the drug addicted brother, the young woman who marries rich and the organizer of the Ponzi scheme. The prose was well written and the descriptions of the setting were engaging, but the events were not enough to make me want to finish the book. I did finish, by listening to the audio, but found at the end that I did not care much for what happened to the characters. I will try the next St. John Mandel title, in the hopes the plot will match the exemplary writing style.

St. John Mandel writes with such a satisfying precision with an accuracy of detail that truly transports the reader. The settings she chooses are vastly and wonderfully varied yet tied together so neatly that St. John Mandel can be described as nothing less than masterful in her prose. I adored this book and am so grateful for the opportunity to read and review the NetGalley ARC.

Strange story, sometimes good, sometimes just okay. Character's stories seem to fold over each other and echo back.

With a large cast of characters and an eerie setting, this should have been an amazing novel. What ended up happening was too many names and a setting that changed with each paragraph.

This wasn't a bad novel, this just wasn't what I was hoping for with the description. The white collar crime ended up being the focus of the book, which could be okay, but I was hoping for more of the disappearance which is only brought up in the last quarter of the book. What a lot of this ends up being is a bland descriptions of what each character is doing after being caught as a part of the Ponzi scheme, whether it was as a perpetrator or a victim.

I honestly was hoping for more from the Glass Hotel, as in the setting itself, not the book as a whole. You have this awesome setting, a lone island with this amazing hotel, where no one can get off unless they call the boat, and it's barely used as a location for the story. Vincent and her brother Paul work there for a few months. Paul gets fired and goes off the deep end, Vincent ends up becoming the paid "wife" of a high class con man. Then the hotel disappears from sight except for a brief mention at the end while we get caught up on how all the minor characters are doing.

This is excellently written, I love Emily's ability to write, but this became an issue of me thinking the description is one thing and the novel ends up being completely different.

Copy provided by NetGalley

This starts out slow and meandering; it only really coalesces when you get to the financial scheme / lives of the very rich. That part of the book was quite good. Most of the rest of it just never really came together for me.

Emily St. John Mandel is a fantastic writer, and reading this novel gave me a great appreciation of her range. I'm a long time fan of Station Eleven, and I wasn't sure how I would feel about a pre-apocalyptic novel. I found this just as gripping, though in a very different way. I found the characters and their strange, sometimes hard to believe lives really compelling and I was disappointed when the book was over - not because I wasn't satisfied by the ending, but because I wanted to keep reading.

Beautiful, weird, a little otherworldly, while also grounded in the smallest bits of reality at the same time. The Glass Hotel took me a while to immerse myself in, with its spiraling shifts in time and narrative point-of-view. Most of the story takes place in the age of financial excess and the tipping point into the Great Recession, and has a lot to say about wealth, connection, and what parts of our pasts and our actions come back to haunt us. It was interesting to gain other perspectives than Vincent's, but after a while I felt the book strayed too far from her and wished it would re-center her thoughts and experiences. Very visual story-- I was thinking about the plot while doing the dishes one night and forgot it was a book and not a tv show, which is the first time that's happened!