“The Dream Hotel” by Laila Lalami is a futuristic novel set in a world where technology dominates. The protagonist is incarcerated for a crime she is foretold to commit.

The narrative is characterized by its explicit detail and well-developed characters. The story employs multiple timelines and incorporates numerous language styles commonly found in computer-generated text.

Overall, it is a compelling and thought-provoking work that offers a glimpse into the potential future.

Thank you to Knopf for the review copy!
This was kind of a miss for me but I am giving a strong review for recognizing what I think is of value with the story and that is a highly impressive approach to timely themes on how we are tracked, where our autonomy begins and ends, and a whole lot of stylish speculative writing... the ideas in this book matter and Lalami is a talented writer. The book is a win for discussion of themes even if for me I struggled with reading the book.

I wanted to like this one a lot more than I did, I think it's a case of the plot ending up being perhaps not the right time for me to give into speculative fiction...For me the ideas just didn't develop in a way that kept me wanting to read the book, I felt at times confused in a way that was more alienating than engaging. The premise had a lot of potential for suspense but the plot slowed instead of sped up, leaving me a little more distant from the book than I think was intended. Again, might be the current climate and strains of life in the US right now that have my professional life feeling uncertain and speculative in and of itself.

Well-written, page-turning, and felt like a much truer prediction of what a not-too-distant future could look like if it was built on AI promises, tough-on-crime politics, and a profits-over-everything corporate ethos.

I think a lot of other authors who write in this genre (about what unleashing tech and AI onto our society will do to us) can lay it on a little too thick or just give these broad pronouncements like “the robots are going to be controlling all of us!!”, but Lalami does a great job of 1) depicting the smaller indignities, like being told you have to wear your hair in a certain style of bun, set against the more offensive backdrop of having your literal freedom restricted; and 2) demonstrating that, though the tech is exploitative, at the end of the day, it’s human beings making the decision to repress other human beings. On that last point, I actually think back to the beginning of the book where Sara is getting questioned at LAX because her score was flagged as being right on the bubble. She shows her frustration to the agents questioning her and, only after she’s sent away does she realize that, risk report aside, they actually had the power and discretion to let her go if they wanted to, and they might have if she “acted like she knew her place.” The fact that she didn’t cost her almost a year in confinement. It’s the perfect reminder that, though the technologies enable the repression, it’s really the smallness and pettiness of the people controlling them that deprive us of our humanity. Taking off one star because I thought the ending was very disappointing.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the advance copy.

This book is terrifying.

Publication date 3/4/2025
Thank you @pantheon and @netgalley for this gifted e-ARC.

Incarceration based on dreams you have—which are monitored—in order to prevent future crimes. This is absolute nightmare fodder. And then add the fact that this means she’ll be separated from her children? No thank you.

It took me along time to even get to the 20% mark because of how stressed out I was from reading this. I think I even convinced myself that I wasn’t engaged enough with it to finish. But I kept going because Laila Lalami is one of those writers that you trust completely! Her writing and storytelling is truly impressive. You are in good hands with Lalami and The Dream Hotel.

But it’s not only a propulsive nail biting read; like any great speculative fiction, it’s thought provoking and provides excellent social commentary on our legal system and how far we’ll go in the wrong direction to give our selves a sense of security. and there’s more here to chew on as well, but I won’t give any spoilers.

Read this. But maybe not before bed like I did.

Honestly one of the best books I have read in a while. It felt all too plausible and super eerie! It gave me the creeps in the best ways! This will be one for recommendations!!

Thank you so much for the gifted copy of this book!

This was one of my most anticipated reads of this quarter, and I was not disappointed. I'm going to dive right in to the review because you can read the synopsis, but this was such a relevant read. The monitoring. The risk assessment. The risk SCORE. It was a terrifying look into what could EASILY become our future if we let it. The user agreement they signed for the DreamSavers without reading the fine print was SO REAL and so much like the user agreements we sign without knowing what they entail. There wasn't even a question of "how did this happen" because it's where we're currently heading. This book is a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.

This is a must read! I personally have a fascination with dystopian sci-fi stories, with plots set in realistic/futuristic timelines; think The Handmaid’s Tale, but without all of the vulgarity. It only took me a day and a half to read this because I could not put it down. Laila Lalami is quite the talented writer!

I was captivated by Sara’s journey at Madison. It was gritty, too realistic at times to feel comfortable, and really well done. I felt extreme empathy for her situation, and was drawn in by her determination to fight while staying just compliant enough not to harm her future.

In our current age of AI, tracking, smart devices, and data at our fingertips, I had some anxiety while reading this book (being that it feels possible) which made it that much more riveting and eye-opening.

I would love to see this book become a movie. I would be one of the first to see it!

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC! All opinions are my own.

I absolutely ate this book up. It’s entertaining and philosophical. It’s an absolute ride from start to finish. And this cover is stunning!! This woman write impeccably well. It was unputdownable.

Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel is like A Handmaid's Tale for 2025. Imagine a world where technology purporting to improve your life insidiously collects data on your everyday movements and uses them to make you a more pliant consumer, where lawmakers allied with big business is more concerned with protecting corporate interests than the liberties of their electorates, where prorietary black box algorithms are given free reign to shape people's lives, where apathy slowly chips away at due process and the rights of the accused. Just imagine!

The Dream Hotel concerns an overwhelmed new mother named Sara who purchases a neural implant to help her sleep, and it seems to do what it's supposed to do until one day she's detained at airport security because her "risk score", an index calculated from various data-tracking sources including her sleep implant, has risen above the acceptable range and flagged her for potentially committing a future crime. What follows is Sara's journey to extricate herself from detainment, a Catch-22 situation in which she has to lower her risk score while being held at a facility away from her family, where everything she experiences only increases the amount of strain and anxiety she suffers.

I devoured this book. Despite being a work of science fiction, there are a lot of elements in this book that already exist or could easily exist in our currently fraught times. This is definitely one worth reading!

Harrowing, terrifying, eerie. Never read something like this before and I really enjoyed it. I can’t wait to read what’s next from this author!

3.5 stars! 🌟 Huge thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor & NetGalley for the ARC! 💌

Welcome to a future where your dreams can get you arrested. ☁️🚔

Sara lands at LAX, expecting to see her husband and baby twins—NOT to be told that she's a future criminal. 🤯 The Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) has analyzed her dreams, and the algorithm decided she's a threat to her husband. Guilty before proven innocent.

She’s taken to The Dream Hotel—aka a high-tech prison disguised as a retention center—where women are locked up for potential crimes. Every step, every word, every breath is monitored, and the rules? Always changing. 😵‍💫 A 21-day stay turns into months, with no way out.

Dystopian nightmares? Try dystopian reality. 🔥

This book had me suffocating alongside Sara. Every time she thought she was getting closer to freedom, BAM—another rule, another punishment, another reason to keep her trapped. It’s slow, but that’s the point. The system is designed to break you, and Laila makes you feel every moment of that helplessness.

⏳ Dystopian Future
🔒 Big Brother/Surveillance State
⏳ Wrongfully Accused
🔒 Trapped with No Escape
⏳ Psychological Thriller
🔒 Morality & Ethics of Technology

The scariest part? It felt TOO real. 😨 We already live in a world where data is collected from every device, every social media post, every click. Would people really protest a system that "prevents" crime? Or would they let it happen, convincing themselves it’s for safety?

This book is a psychological thriller, a dystopian drama, and a terrifying look at our tech-driven future all rolled into one. Sara’s desperation, the hopelessness of fighting a faceless system, and the moral questions it raises?? CHEF’S KISS. 🤌✨

LOVED:
✔ The concept. It’s haunting, realistic, and forces you to question EVERYTHING about privacy, freedom, and justice.
✔ Sara’s fight for her identity. She’s NOT a hero. She’s just a woman trying to survive a system that’s crushing her. And that makes her SO real.
✔ The eerie, slow-burn tension. It’s not a fast-paced action thriller—it’s psychological. The dread builds, every rule change feels like a punch, and you start feeling trapped with Sara.

MEH:
❌ Some parts felt too long—the middle dragged a bit.
❌ I wanted deeper connections between Sara and other characters. The friendships in the center? SO interesting, but not fleshed out enough!
❌ The ending… I’m still processing. 😵‍💫 Not bad, but I expected more of a punch after ALL that build-up.

"The data doesn’t lie."
"It doesn’t tell the truth, either."

This book is a warning. A terrifying, unputdownable, too-close-to-reality warning. 🚨 If you love speculative fiction, dystopian thrillers, or books that make you question EVERYTHING—this one's for you.

This book saw me. As a mother, a woman, a professional and as a scared human exisiting in the states right now. Doesnt even deserve to be called united and probably never did. Thank you for helping me channel some rage.
I will PROUDLY share this with my learners as a 2025 version of Handmaids Tale, 1984, Fahrenheit 51 all in one.
Beautiful
Important
Smart
Scary AF

Readers follow Sara as she is held for observation due to potentially “dangerous” dreams. This timely novel holds a mirror up to our data obsessed landscape and warns of the bleak future ahead as AI and data mining continue to grow. Although I found the themes of privacy, technology, freedom, race, and guilt fascinating, the plot was predictable. The prose felt detached at times as well, and the dream sequences lacked a disorienting or unsettling atmosphere you would expect. A promising topic with a fairly standard delivery. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!

Wildly interesting (and conceptually not that difficult to envision) dystopian lit fiction. This was a new author to me but the writing was compelling and I couldn’t put it down.

In The Dream Hotel we follow Sara when she is sent for retention basically because of an algorithm. Her risk score has gone above 500 and a 21 day hold is required. It’s very difficult to gather information in the retention center and in many ways felt similar to a for-profit prison. Despite her initial 21 day assessment, Sara has been stuck in the center for months which is common of most of its “participants” due to the infinitely slow rate at which things move in this bureaucracy. It’s definitely a sloooooooooower burn. There’s not a ton of action and it’s one of those books you’ll hate because you’re bored or love because you’re fascinated. I was the latter, for sure.

It really wasn’t that hard to conceptualize a society where crime prevention has become so prevalent. Think Minority Report (sans psychic triplets) but more so using all the data of your life, plus that of your dreams, if you’ve received certain technological devices. The chain of events that lands Sara in the center are so incredibly innocuous, but it’s really not that much of a stretch to imagine algorithms making dumb decisions when too heavily relied upon. I did want a bit more from this book. There were several threads that we never really got to unravel. I’m left with many questions and the ending was a bit abrupt. Overall a really great read and one I’d recommend to those who appreciate dystopian lit fiction.

Thank you to Pantheon for the free ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This out next week on 3/4!

Dystopian/Speculative Fiction. Imagine a world in which everyone single piece of data about you is factored into a risk score which is used to predict how likely you are to commit a crime. From interactions on social media, to your finances, to even the contents of your dreams. For Sara, she was desperate to get sleep after she had twins and agreed to a brain implant that would help her sleep, but in the fine print it said they also had access to all her dreams. After an encounter gone wrong in the airport, Sara’s risk rating is deemed to high after dreams of killing her husband and she is sent to a retention center for a 21 day hold to ensure she’s no longer a danger. But after breaking some arbitrary rules at the center three weeks turns into months, and Sara is still no closer to being released. Sick of the control, Sara starts to break the status quo of the center to at least feel some type of freedom, but that means she might not make it home at all.

WHOOO this was DARK. In a society where so much of our data is already sold and private corporations are profiting off of human suffering (ie prison), the thought of an algorithm used to “prevent future crime” which uses DREAMS is pretty wild. This felt like a episode of Black Mirror meets Orange is the New Black. I was hooked - great writing and story telling and a super original plot.

I just finished Laila Lalami's "The Dream Hotel" and I can't stop thinking about it. This masterful speculative fiction novel grabs you from the first page with a premise that feels eerily plausible: what if your own dreams could mark you as a future criminal?

The story follows Sara, who arrives at an airport exhausted after a long flight, only to be detained based on an algorithm's prediction that she might commit a crime. She's shuttled to a facility where the rules are designed not for rehabilitation but for permanent containment. As days stretch into weeks, surveillance tightens like a noose, and Sara's struggle shifts from seeking freedom to preserving her very identity.

Lalami expertly crafts a near-future that feels like the natural evolution of our present: a world where technology marketed as protection becomes the perfect tool for control.

The slow-burning tension is masterfully executed, creating a mounting sense of hopelessness and absurdity as Sara navigates a system that values algorithmic output above human judgment. Through her journey, we realize this nightmare could befall any of us, which makes the story all the more terrifying.

"The Dream Hotel" raises profound questions about privacy, autonomy, and the true cost of security that will haunt you long after you've turned the final page. If you enjoy thought-provoking speculative fiction that holds a mirror to our society's trajectory, this is an absolute must-read.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for providing me with an eARC.

An absolute pleasure of a book. Infuriating and horrifying in how within reach the technology of this near-future seem to be, Sara is a relatable and sympathetic protagonist whose troubles echo real world injustices. I felt myself raging right alongside her for all that is done to her for the sake of "safety" (or, safety disguised as corporate profit).

Truly well-crafted and paced, I couldn't look away and finished this in just 2 sittings. I only stopped reading to sleep, and thankfully my dreams are not the property of some tech conglomerate - and after reading this, they never will be.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

The Dream Hotel
Laila Lalami

ARC courtesy of the publisher, Pantheon, and NetGalley.

On the flight home from London, 39-year old Getty Museum archivist, Sara Hussein is detained at LAX, and remanded to Madison, a retention facility. According to computer algorithms, based mainly on analysis of her dreams, she is determined to pose a safety risk to her husband Elias, allegedly for a latent desire to murder him.

This is the premise for Laila Lalami’s latest novel, The Dream Hotel. Set in dystopian world where we are in constant surveillance – what we do, who we call, our email, the online sites we click on, what we post on social media, and now even our dreams, “over two hundred data sources” - are processed by computer algorithms to determine our “risk score,” and are acted upon pre-emptively by detaining those deemed to pose unacceptable risk of committing violence, by detention without due process to prevent the crime from occurring. It is a thought-provoking concept, all the more made chilling by the fact that, with the exception of our dreams, this tracking and data-gathering is already happening. It is not a far-fetched idea for the next step, that is, action being taken against the individual, for such. Or is it already reality? Try doing a Google search on how to make a home-made explosive. Or log on to a porn site on your work phone. See what happens. <i>”That they have committed no crime is beside the point. In any case crime is relative, its boundaries shifting in service of the people in power.”</i>

Not only is the prevention of crime the issue. Cars that automatically measure the driver’s blood alcohol level, and will automatically suspend his/her/their license. Mandatory step counters used to deny health insurance or increase premiums if you fail to meet the minimum “Health and Fitness Score.” Certainly, this novel will have you thinking a long time after you put it down.

Lalami leaves us with this: <i>”She wants to be free, and what is freedom if not the wresting 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.”</i>

Stunning! A futurisic story rooted in our reality that felt too close to home at times. So many interesting things to say about surveillance and the pros and cons we are faced with.

While the premise was nice, the writing was... not what I expected. I wanted more from the characters because I felt that what was on the front cover and the front flap was not what we were given.