The Glass Hotel had me fully immersed from the beginning. Upon finishing, I am not quite sure what I was fully immersed in. Similar to Station Eleven, this book is beautifully written. Moments, to me, were almost poetic and have haunted me since finishing. I cannot, however, declare it has a defined central message. Being highly character-driven, this story encompasses themes such as crisis and survival, the search for meaning, and a delusional search for love at all costs. It is a very strange story and not one that particularly reads as a happy read. I honestly cannot fully wrap my mind around it but enjoyed the reading experience.

This book was so elegantly written and gorgeous. The characters are so fleshed out that you find yourself curious even about the most minor of cast. I could not put this one down.

Fans of Mandel's Station Eleven are right to be excited about her latest book, but should be warned that this book is very, very different. The book opens with a drowning, told in almost movie-like flashes of Vincent's physical and mental experiences as she drowns. I found myself returning to these first few pages repeatedly throughout the book as more and more of Vincent's life leading up to her drowning is revealed. So, nominally, this book is an answer to the question of why Vincent was drowning? Was she pushed (murdered), and if so by whom? Or did she fall? And what was she doing there in the first place?

Really, though, this book is about far more than that. Reading Vincent's story takes us to a remote corner of Canada (home of the eponymous glass hotel), the inside of a Ponzi scheme, and, as a direct consequence, jail. Each setting, each character is rendered almost like a fine painting, with depths and shadows you don't notice at first glance.

The narrative jumps around a bit, from character to character and back and forth in time, and it's not always clear where or when you are, but it works, if you go with the flow. Mandel is a powerful and flexible writer, has more than enough ability to pull off a very different kind of book than Station Eleven (although I wouldn't say no to a sequel!). Station Eleven may have put her firmly on the literary map, but The Glass Hotel makes clear that she is not going to bound by any one genre. I wonder which one she'll choose next.

I'm not even sure how to describe this book. Reading it was an immersive experience, but when I finished I felt a little dazed. I'm going to have to think about it some more.

*Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing an e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

Definitely a “Me” problem as I know many have adored this book. I’ve started and stopped it 5 or 6 times in the last few months... but can’t spark interest. Just not for me.

This was not the book one would think Emily St. John Mandel would write after her amazing Station Eleven. That being said it was still a very interesting book. Vincent and Paul are half-siblings, sharing a father. Vincent's mother was a poet who named her daughter after Edna St. Vincent Millay. She is a bartender at an exclusive hotel on the farthest tip of Vancouver Island. Paul works as a maintenance man there as well. Vincent meets the billionaire, Jonathan Alkaitis, at the hotel and becomes his companion. Alkaitis is running one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history and gets taken down and is sentenced to over a hundred years in prison. Vincent goes to sea and becomes a sous-chef on a tanker that travels up and down the Eastern seaboard delivering material. Paul becomes a musician, using Vincent's videos that she made as a child and putting them to music he composes. Time weaves back and forth as Alkaitis slowly goes mad; Vincent is lost at sea and Paul ends up just living his life. All in all, however, the prose is simply marvelous as Mandel discusses greed, guilt, delusion, and the meaning of life.

(I read an ARC of this novel provided free by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks, Netgalley!)

I want so badly to give this book five stars, but I just can't.

Burning question: Is it like Station Eleven? Yes and no. It's not postapocalyptic, nor is it sci-fi, BUT it is written as beautifully. This one is literary fiction with a touch of magical realism. As in Station Eleven, though, the ending is...off.

The Glass Hotel is about half-siblings who lead complicated but intertwining lives. I'm not going to rewrite the summary you can read above, but that's the gist of it. Vincent (named after Edna St Vincent Millay) and Paul are from a small part of Vancouver called Caiette. They leave and come back and leave again, etc. At one point, they work together in a hotel near Caiette that sits alone on on an island close to the town. There, their lives diverge but in ways connected to each other and to the hotel's owner, Jonathan Alkaitis.

It's fantastic and beautiful until the end, when it kind of falls apart. That shouldn't keep you from reading it, but don't let yourself be disappointed when it happens. This seems like a trend with Mandel. I don't remember much detail about Station Eleven except that I really liked it, but I only gave it three stars here and I said about that ending exactly what I say about this one: it fell flat. It's like she has an amazing idea for a novel, gets into it, develops a world that sucks in the reader (it was invading my dreams!), and then realizes that she has to end it but doesn't know how.

Hopefully her next book will be more drawn together, though I'll be first in line to read it either way.

After the success of her novel Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel's newest novel was my most anticipated of the March 2020 book releases. Mandel starts you off with a teaser - a woman falling into the ocean with a few flashes along the way. Then she slowly unravels a story of Vincent, a hotel bartender, and Jonathan Alkaitis, a rich financier running a Ponzi scheme.

After reading the book, I'm having difficulty deciphering my feelings. Her writing is exquisite - both haunting and soulful. Yet, the story drifts along without an anchor. Although the characters are connected, the narrative doesn't have any driving force, lacking a central message. If you plan to read it, I suggest tempering your expectations.

Taking a ponzi scheme and turning it inside out, this ingenious novel takes the reader inside an elaborate web of characters. The before, during and after experiences of each character are as varied as the ways each is impacted by the scheme. This is no closed room crime to be solved, instead the reader is invited into a world of opportunism, falsehood, grief and regret that is at once interloping and familiar .

Emily St. John Mandel's newest novel, The Glass Hotel, is a story that feels like broken glass to read: it's fragmented, sharp, many-faceted, and sparkling at certain angles, but dark at others. Which is appropriate, considering this novel-in-layers ultimately hinges on broken glass (in more senses than one). The Glass Hotel is nothing like Station Eleven, and nothing like what I expected, in the best ways. Themes of familial relationships, betrayal, white collar crime, death, and isolation are woven throughout The Glass Hotel, and the story is told in shifting perspectives spanning years, creating a heavily layered tale that sits a sense of dread and foreboding in the gut immediately upon opening the novel. If this all sounds overwhelming, it is, but it is so worth experiencing.

This is Emily St. John Mandel doing what she does best, writing about people live in such a fluid, effortless way I was amazed that I'd finished the book a day after I started it, and could have easily done with another several hundred pages of Vincent, Jonathan, Paul, Hotel Caiette, and all the rest.

I'm finding this book hard to review. It covers the various lives of people loosely connected with some having more in-depth profiles and others just lightly touched upon, so it's not vignettes and it doesn't feel like a fully fleshed novel, so what exactly is it? Well, at least I know it has beautiful prose, a magical-realism touch that makes it seem fleeting, slightly ethereal, ghost-like (and ghosts are characters, so that makes sense), and an impressively light touch on issues of morality and right and wrong. If there is one defining moment, or touchstone, it appears to be a Ponzi scheme that sounds quite familiar (think Bernie Madoff) that is a before and after. Although even that isn't correct because the story begins before that, with the lives of a half-sister and brother, each dealing with their own trauma. So you see why it's tough to encapsulate into a brief review. In any case, I quite enjoyed the book, loving the language, feeling the vague sense of dread knowing there is a before and after, knowing that the book ends how it started, and always wondering how the dots were going to be connected and being impressed that they are.

Emily St. John Mandel's surreal novel "The Glass Hotel" centers around the 2008 financial crisis. The primary characters are a Bernie Madoff-like character named Jonathan Alkaitis, his young wife Vincent, and her brother, Paul.

Paul is an addict and artist, and Vincent is a filmmaker and bartender. Alkaitis is running a multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme and owns, among many other things, a hotel made of glass and cedar, accessible only by water, on an island in northern Vancouver. Vincent is tending bar in the hotel when Alkaitis, more than 30 years her senior, sweeps her up into an unromantic romance and into what Vincent calls "the kingdom of money."

The hotel represents the dream of easy wealth that propels the victims of the financial meltdown. While the novel jumps around in time, at any moment, past or present, a character might make a choice to veer off in what seems like an artificial direction, onto a life trajectory that should never have been. This is as true for the corporation's employees as it is for the investors in the Ponzi scheme. Ghosts haunt the characters in the novel who caused their deaths, but there is no haunting by those departed loved ones—such as Alkaitis's wife and Vincent's mother—whose loss is so enormous that their losses make everything unreal and lower the stakes of all choices after they are gone.

Social media, fantasies, consumerism, and short films all keep grim reality at a safe remove, reframed and reframed again. Moving money, popping pills, vanishing with a new identity, the long arm of the law on your shoulder, plummeting into poverty: all of these can conjure up an unrecognizable life. Just as the glass hotel vanishes into the forest and the fog, choice and fate, the real life and the "otherlife," become hopelessly blurred.

More explanations and connections in the denouement would have improved the novel. Some of the characters and situations that were interesting at the beginning seemed to lead to dead ends. However, the novel succeeded in capturing my imagination and I enjoyed the spell the author cast throughout the novel of slipping into the shadowy and perilous margins between intertwined lives and destinies, which was quite brilliantly done.

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from the publisher and was encouraged to submit a review.

I read an advanced reader copy. I really like the story and the characters, the writing was very good. Story got a little surreal in parts and you must keep up with the characters throughout, seemingly insignificant characters become important. I would have liked more about Faisal and didn’t feel his part of story resolved.

This slow burn of a novel is definitely worth some patience at the beginning. By the half-way mark, I was eager to find out how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together -- and how everything fell apart in the "country of money." Beautifully written. A fine follow-up to Station Eleven.

Captivating at first, with an array of interesting characters. but by the end, when the Ponzi scheme was falling apart I felt like the narrative became less interesting. At then end I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take away from the story.

Exceedingly compelling. Like Station 11 it has a gauzy feeling, weaving back and forth in time and floating from character to character. But the threads holding everything together - characters, plot - are very strong. A great read.

A bartender at a hotel meets a rich investor who alters the course of her life. A story of greed and corruption, but at the same time a touching search for the meaning of life. This novel jumps all over the place and was not as enjoyable as Station Eleven.

The Glass Hotel is beautifully written, with characters that feel fully described. I enjoyed the structure of the novel, going back and forth in time, and sometimes into the character's imagined reality.

I've been a fan of St. John Mandel's writing since I read Last Night in Montreal years ago. To me, The Glass Hotel feels a bit more like this novel than her most popular, Station Eleven. I adore the dream-like quality of the scenes, while still keeping the reader rooted in reality. This is a rare gift that I cannot say I've encountered in many other novels.