Emily St. John Mandel is one of my very favorite writers. She writing is hypnotic in its beauty. I found myself trying to read slower to prolong the book but I just couldn't stop reading. I loved this, start to finish. That's it.

I think it would be hard for any author to out-do themselves after a book like Station Eleven, but I do think this is a strong comeback from Emily St. John Mandel. I would recommend reading her earlier works before this one to get a feel for her style of making very atmospheric settings. It wasn't the strongest fiction I've read this year but was certainly entertaining.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review of this novel.

Paul and Vincent, half siblings, are the main characters in this novel. Their stories are both interwoven and separate.

First line: Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain---

Summary: Vincent is the night bartender at the exclusive Hotel Caiette. One night she meets a man who will change her life and the lives of hundreds of other people as well. Several years after their chance encounter the Ponzi scheme that Jonathan Alkaitis was running made national news. Investors are ruined. Losing everything Vincent takes a job on a shipping vessel but one night she disappears without a trace.

My Thoughts: I was really underwhelmed with this book. I liked Vincent and her storyline. I wish it had just been a short story about her. There were so many characters with intertwining stories. The story and plot jumped around like crazy. It was hard to figure out what all was going on. And the financial storyline was boring. I was expecting more.

FYI: Read the author’s previous work, Station Eleven.

Truly excellent. This book was gripping until the last page. Most books that jump around between different perspectives leave you wishing you were still following the previous thread, while all of these were interwoven so well that they were all equally intriguing.

I enjoyed this book alot but if I went into it with a little less hype I would have enjoyed it more. This book reads a lot like Station Eleven with lots of different character stories and interesting webs and how they connect. Since most of the book is rotating around the 2008 financial crash it kind of lacked interest for me. I still finished and was quite happy with it overall.
Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an arc for an honest review!

Imagine that you have selected a jigsaw puzzle, attracted by the picture and number of pieces. Then imagine that you have brought it home and begun working on it. As the process goes on, it dawns on you that the pieces of the puzzle don’t fit together. Can you picture your frustration at being unable to complete your project?
This is how I felt about The Glass Hotel. Although individually the pieces of this story were interesting, they never came together in a coherent whole. The story itself was an ill-conceived mashup of economic cautionary tale about the perpetrators and victims of an elaborate but so predictable Ponzi scheme and magic realism involving voices from beyond the grave and ghosts providing either warnings or comfort.. Some of the characters are strongly drawn and are guideposts throughout the story. Others disappear with little fanfare and leave the reader wondering what she missed. A few characters seem to have entirely too much time on stage considering the slight impact they have in the story.
All in all, I would not recommend making a reservation for a stay in The Glass Hotel.

I'm not sure what I expected from The Glass Hotel... but I didn't end up finding it. Perhaps that's due to how much I loved Station Eleven to the point where anything I've read since is in silent competition. Or maybe it's that I didn't really know or care what the plot was because it's an Emily St. John Mandel novel so absolutely I was going to read it. So it's not very fair of me to judge the two against one another—but I can't help it, so I did. And The Glass Hotel came up short.

Did I feel the same pull while reading? This slight tug that only Station Eleven has been able to exert? Yes, of course. I slipped into Mandel's prose like warm bath water and luxuriated in the syntax and the flow and the precise grammatical and structural choices. But I wasn't wowed by the story in the same way. I went looking for a single thread that would pull the book together and instead found a ball of tangled string. A woman does disappear from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme does implode in New York City... but these are just anchor points around which Mandel weaves her characters.

The Glass Hotel is, at its core, a ghost story—a story about the figurative ghosts of our past haunting our present, how the choices we make continuously inform who we are and who we become. But it's also a literal ghost story—a story of the people and places that stay with us, that we must accept or else be consumed by them.

And maybe I'm just not in the mood for a ghost story right now; the future seems bleak enough.

Beautiful prose can be expected from any Emily St. John Mandel book. And she doesn't disappoint with The Glass Hotel. I know people are comparing it to Station Eleven (which I loved), and are are a couple of characters from Station Eleven that appear in The Glass Hotel. But it's that's about it. The Glass Hotel focuses on a Ponzi scheme and the effect on the people surrounding it. It's part mystery and part ghost story. But I didn't feel any of the characters were likable, and I really didn't care what happened to them. Maybe that's why it took me a while to get through this book - it put me to sleep on more than one occasion. I'm a big fan of Mandel's writing, so I stuck with it. I really wanted to love this book, but it's just a mild like. I'd probably give this one 3.5 stars.

The Glass Hotel is an atmospheric, people-centered glimpse into a Ponzi scheme and how it affects everyone involved. A series of character threads, from the woman who marries the man in charge of the scheme to the naive investor who loses everything, all eventually connect back in some way to a small luxury hotel in the Canadian wilderness. Spanning decades, this work of literary fiction is primarily a tale of the things people do to survive and how they rationalize their actions to themselves and others. While this novel didn't really grab me, and at times was a bit confusing in terms of timelines, it was still a fairly engaging story that will likely interest fans of character-driven fiction.

I struggled with this book, but I think it's my fault, not the book's. The avarice of the characters got me down, and the moody ghost story atmosphere was just not what I needed while cooped up in my house due to COVID-19. However, Emily St. John Mandel is a heckuva writer, and that's just as evident in this book as it was in Station Eleven. I need to re-read this when I'm in a better frame of mind.

I wanted to love this book so much after loving Station Eleven so deeply. But it just missed the mark for me. Beautiful writing but the story didn't grab me in the same way.

So much character development and so many plot lines, I don't even know where to begin. This book takes us from Toronto to British Columbia to New York and from underground clubs to 5 star hotels to prison.

The main thread follows Vincent, who is the trophy girlfriend to a man who is running a Ponzi scheme. Anyone who followed the Bernie Madoff scandal will be familiar with that part. There is a lot of winding around with her brother who slips in and out of the story.

See? I can't even begin to explain this story. But the writing is exquisite and the story is enjoyable (although, it's more than a bit depressing) and I am a huge fan of this author.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

There are few better feelings than the sensation that comes with the dawning realization that the book you are reading isn’t just good, but great. No matter how much hype you’ve seen, no matter how many recommendations you’ve received, it all comes out in the reading. When the language captivates you and the narrative enthralls you and the themes provoke you … that’s a great book.

Emily St. John Mandel’s “The Glass Hotel” offers up just such greatness.

It’s a mesmerizing puzzle box of a book, one whose many interconnected parts are in seemingly constant motion, both through space and time. That sense of propulsive perpetuity creates an almost insatiable hunger in the reader; we simply can’t stop. There’s a rhythm to the steady movement that borders on the hypnotic, sweeping us away at speeds that vary from snail-paced to breakneck – all in service to an incredible story.

An aberrant, almost surreal modern hotel in the midst of the Canadian wilderness. A high-level financial firm with returns seemingly too good to be true. A cargo ship crashing through the Atlantic’s waves. A medium-security prison. The unanticipated dynamics inherent to the seedier side of downtown Toronto and the falsified smiles and rubbed elbows of the ultra-rich.

At the center of all of this, in ways both obvious and subtle, is a young woman named Vincent. Dealing with the aftermath of a tragic event in her small-town childhood, Vincent seeks to escape. In her teen years, she resorts of small acts of rebellion – vandalism and the like. She has a fraught relationship with her brother Paul, a musician of some talent who is also cursed with demons that seem destined to be his constant companions.

But even as she flees her home and loses herself in city life, she’s drawn to return home. Specifically, to work at the shining glass monolith that is the Hotel Caiette, located on an isolated end of Vancouver Island – a five-star monument to the idea that the wealthiest among us want not to experience nature, but merely to observe it.

She crosses paths with Jonathan Alkaitis, a massively wealthy investment advisor who also happens to be the hotel’s owner. In a seeming instant, Vincent is plucked from the hardscrabble obscurity of her service industry life to become the consort of one of the country’s wealthiest men. She is a trophy, but not a wife (though neither she nor Alkaitis is inclined to let that truth slip); her job is to be the escort that Alkaitis wants, when he wants.

But Alkaitis’s success is built on a dark secret. The returns on his investment fund are so metronomically excellent that they seem almost impossible … and so they are. For decades, he has been executing financial fraud on a massive scale, with just a scant handful of employees being aware of the extent of his misdeeds. And when the end comes, it comes quickly.

Even as these lives – and various others – tick along their paths, they all remain ensnared by the overwhelming gravitational pull of Vincent. She is the fulcrum, the central point around which these people orbit, whether they know it or not … or whether she does. As they twist and spin, they begin to intersect in ways both expected and utterly surprising en route to a satisfying denouement.

A work of literature that is truly special is a rare thing. Knowing that said work of literature is special even as you read it is much rarer. “The Glass Hotel” is an example of the latter, a book that announces itself with such triumphant confidence that you’re ready to sing its praises to the skies after just a scant handful of pages. Compelling characterizations, narrative vividity, thematic complexity – often, you’re lucky to get just two of those three, even in quality works. To have the trio represented so fully is a gift.

Mandel is a writer of many gifts; one of her greatest is the ability to breathe life into unusual settings. The incongruous glass edifice of the titular hotel is one, but we see so much more: the private jets and yachts of the 1%, the basement apartments and sticky-floored clubs of the urban youth. We spend time on cargo ships and in prisons. We see the lifestyles of the rich and famous juxtaposed against the people eventually destroyed by those lifestyles, either directly or indirectly. And every setting – physical, emotional or both – is rendered with breathtaking clarity by Mandel.

“The Glass Hotel” is masterful, an elegantly constructed work of great emotional power and literary sophistication. While the narrative complexity is significant, it never once enters into the realm of convolution; every piece of the puzzle is placed just so, allowing the overall picture to appear in exactly the manner in which the author intends. It’s a meditation on just how surprisingly thin the foundations on which we stand can be – and how easily they can break, leaving us floundering in shadowy depths we never expected and don’t understand.

Truly a great book, one that will stay with you long after the last page is turned.

The Glass Hotel is the story of Vincent, a bartender who returns to her hometown of Caiette where she finds work at an isolated, luxury hotel. One evening she meets the wealthy owner, Jonathan Alkaitis. During that evening he offers her a proposition that will change the course of her life. Since the death of his wife, Alkaitis misses that familiar companionship, even though he has no desire to remarry. Instead, he suggests to Vincent that she live with him and pose as his spouse. With this single decision, Vincent is introduced to the glittering world of wealth and influence. Meanwhile, Alkaitis is involved in an increasingly dangerous ponzi scheme. When it finally collapses many lives, including Vincent’s, are changed forever.

This is a difficult book to categorize or even describe. Throughout there are several intertwining stories. The characters are interesting and many are sympathetic and understandable. The settings are varied and colorful, and the descriptions are vivid. It is a complex book about greed, redemption, love, guilt, consequences, and ghosts of past mistakes.

I found this book to be very compelling and difficult to set aside. Emily St John Mandel is a masterful storyteller who has written a book whose story will linger long after the last page is turned. I thoroughly enjoyed The Glass Hotel and would give it 4.5 stars.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a copy of this book for review.

Smart storytelling and layered characterization help create an addictive book about the world of finance (sort-of), family, morality and regret.

The Glass Hotel is a wonderful showcase of Emily St. John Mandel’s evocative, immersive and thoughtful writing style. She crafts snapshots of various characters’ lives that effortlessly sit side by side and collectively highlight how our choices can haunt us. I’m normally not of a fan of novels with too many central characters and no main protagonist but her language is so engaging, lyrical and atmospheric that I easily sank into the story and enjoyed turning the pages.

The first chapter turned me off with its choppy, confusing snippets, which is unfortunate because if I weren’t familiar with the author I may have dismissed the book too soon and missed out on a great read. My favorite sections of the book were those that felt like standalone stories; I left these chapters wishing there was an entire book devoted to each: Paul’s college years, the Ponzi scheme unraveling, Olivia’s life as a painter, Vincent at sea... together they form an introspective, contemplative read that is wholly enjoyable.

Recommend for: Readers all about evocative writing who would rather have a quiet story with thoughtful characterizations than a punchy plot with thrills and twists

May not be for you if: You prefer your reads to be linear and focused on one or two central characters and a main story

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Published March 30, 2020 / by Littoral Librarian / Leave a Comment

Publication Date March 24, 2020
I have tried and tried to read Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s blockbuster hit from 2014, but just haven’t been able to get into it – so I can’t say I was a fan of hers. But after reading the blurb for her latest, The Glass Hotel, I was happy to receive a copy from Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

The book almost feels like two books in one: the first and final sections are entitled “Vincent In the Ocean,” feature one of the main characters: a woman named Vincent who has apparently fallen from a ship and is drowning. It turns out that she is a bartender at a five-star hotel in a very isolated spot on the northern end of Vancouver Island. It’s one of those places where rich people go when they want to experience their version of roughing it: “Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness…don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent…”

Vincent and her brother Paul, a second main character, work at the hotel, which is located near where they grew up. While away at school, Paul wanted SO badly to fit in. One night, he went to a club trying to buddy up to a classmate named Tim, who “…seemed not to understand humor. It was like talking to an anthropologist from another planet.” After a horrific incident occurs at the club, Paul escapes and goes back to B.C. and the hotel where Vincent is working. He’s on the night shift one evening when the hotel owner, the fabulously wealthy Jonathan Alkaitis (the third main character), arrives for a visit and changes the siblings’ lives forever.

It turns out that back in the real world, Jonathan is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through the accounts of his clients in both his brokerage and investment management businesses. It’s very much modeled on the Bernie Madoff scheme, but it’s not a retelling of his activities/crimes. Jonathan’s business empire consists of two distinct entities: the brokerage, a legitimate operation on the 18th floor of a Manhattan high-rise, and the Ponzi scheme, one floor below, which runs alongside the brokerage, and destroys countless fortunes and devastates the lives of a huge number of clients. The story of the Ponzi scheme and its collapse and how that affected the lives of many people, including the three main characters, was the best part of the book for me.

I’ve always been fascinated by the people around financial criminals: did they know? They HAD to know, didn’t they? Could Madoff’s wife and family REALLY not know? In this book, ALkaitis says “…we all know what we do here.” And why didn’t they call the authorities? The perception of the employees who work on the 17th floor is that they “…had crossed a line, that much was obvious, but it was difficult to say later exactly where that line had been. Or perhaps we’d all had different lines, or crossed the same line at different times.” And “…when you’ve worked with a given group of people for a while, calling the authorities means destroying the lives of your friends…we were only one corrupted branch of an otherwise perfectly aboveboard operation.”

I was both attracted to and terrified by the horror of the victims. One of them, Leon, lost everything. When he and his wife lose their home, they move into their RV, and live a somewhat itinerant lifestyle of the somewhat homeless. It’s fascinating to watch their growing awareness of going from fabulously wealthy to being “… citizens of a shadow country.” Mandel uses Leon and Marie’s experiences in the “shadow country” to reveal the grim reality for a growing segment of the U.S. population: “…shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window. He’s always been vaguely aware of its citizens…he’d just never thought he’d have anything to do with it. Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country…enough money…but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they’d all been cut loose, they’d slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.”

When everything hits the fan, Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, is able to just walk off into the night and disappear. For all three main characters, it’s a story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel is a terrific writer, and this will be great for book clubs. TBH, I think I would have enjoyed it even more if it had been focused only on the events around the Ponzi scheme, with the three main characters revolving around it. But it’s so beautifully written, I can overlook that. I loved it. Five stars.

As a highly anticipated release, The Glass Hotel (Knopf) by Emily St. John Mandel has appeared on several “best of March 2020 releases” booklists. Its subject matter — a Ponzi scheme and the 2008 economic collapse — along with its eerily coincidental timing create some tragic parallels to the real world’s current economic crisis. (Not to mention that Mandel’s last novel, Station Eleven, centered on a global flu pandemic.) Whether that brings more people to this choice is unclear. But what is clear is that this is one compelling read.

The Glass Hotel brings together two seemingly unrelated events and characters. What do a young Canadian hotel bartender and a middle-aged Wall Street entrepreneur have to do with each other? Further, what connection exists between a Ponzi scheme and an act of hotel vandalism? Mandel weaves these two seemingly disparate stories together in a manner that could only be described as “six degrees of separation.” Throughout the novel, we’re introduced to characters that are affected by these events or within the orbit of the two main characters—Vincent Smith, the female bartender with the strange name, and Johnathan Alkaitis, the man with the unusually profitable investment plan. Each of the secondary characters has a story to tell and a space to fill in Mandel’s world, building the story by each layer of their life they reveal.

However, the characters aren’t the only vehicle for the story. With each character, there’s a sense of place as they move through their lives. Readers will most likely observe a setting in this novel that they have never seen or even thought about in real life. From the staff areas of a transport ship to an off-season RV park, each character’s life can be seen not just through what they do, but also where they are.

The beginning of the novel is essentially the end of the story. As in, these characters’ fates have been sealed when the reader reads the first line. Mandel then goes back and forth through time and from one character’s point of view to another to reveal to the reader what happened with each of these characters. By the end, it is the reader who’s been transformed and enlightened, and unwittingly so. This is part of the magic of this novel.

The Glass Hotel is magnificently crafted, weaving incidents, characters and settings together to bring the reader into what becomes an educational experience. Inevitably, the reader will internally reference Bernie Madoff, which for most is our current real-life Ponzi reference, as the similarities between Alkaitis and Madoff are extremely close. But unlike the Madoff scheme, which most readers probably watched from afar on news shows and docudramas with fascination and a rudimentary knowledge of the financial fraud scandal, in The Glass Hotel we are brought into the inner workings of a Ponzi scheme via Mandel’s cast of characters. Seeing the collapse of the Ponzi and its aftermath through the eyes of the perpetrators, the victims and the indirectly affected gives the reader a view that is unmatched.

Coincidences aside, The Glass Hotel is rightfully on those coveted “best of” lists. Reading it is not just entertainment; it’s an eye-opening, transformative experience.

4.5 stars--the beginning is a bit slow to start, but it quickly develops into an enveloping, expansive, and beautifully written book.