At what point does protective surveillance become facistic? Sara Hussein finds herself in a nightmare version of custody due to unfortunate interpretation of her answers to interrogations on return from a business trip, and misreading of dreams. In a future delineated by the dictates of a soulless algorithm, the landscape she inhabits has all the "...beauty and joy wrung out of (life)l." Her complicated relationship with her husband and their normal stresses as parents of twins is mined for evidence used against her, so much so that infractions are classified as crimes as opposed to expected reactions. What Lalami has done here is make believable the possible future impact of a world increasingly dictated by AI and its possible misuse by humans. "The algorithm knows so much about her already, going all the way down to the nucleic acids that twist in a helix inside her cells." Her longing for the small joys of life and home have led to an appreciation for all she'd gradually taken for granted. A real page turner that in today's scary landscape could become all too real.

The Dream Hotel is Lalami's latest masterpiece. Like other outstanding dystopian fiction, it's set in a world that is all too real, relying on all-too-possible technology and policies. Sara, an art historian, is stopped by security on her way home from a conference in London, and falsely imprisoned with other women in a jail that was once a school. Their crimes are uncommitted, but based on neurological implants, an algorithm designed to create enslaved labor flags them as potentially dangerous--based on their dreams. It's a horrifying story, especially on the heels of announcements of Neuralink implants and unceasing, un critical media coverage of the second Trump inauguration. It's a must-read, even for those who already know the dangers of what's happening in the US and other nations. The characters are real and compelling, and the scenarios all too plausible. It's a warning: we should heed it.

Wow. I finished this book a few days ago and had to take time to fully process everything. Excellent writing. It’s not extremely difficult to imagine this sort of world in our not-so-distant future. Sara’s retention was entirely the result of a man feeling slighted by her. That alone is far too similar to real life. This book reminded me of the dystopian world created by John Marrs in several of his books. Great read!

I flew through this book in one sitting. I've known Lalami is an incredible writer, and the prose in this novel shows how good she is at her craft. The characters feel very molded, the dialogue well-placed, and the smaller details that make this incredibly surreal tight. It's very much a reflection of the current world we live in and what it could look like--highly recommend this one if you're interested in the synopsis.

With shades of The Handmaid's Tale and Minority Report, this speculative novel is set in a near future where people can be held accountable for crimes that the Risk Assessment Administration's algorithm predicts will occur. Author Laila Lalami explores the creeping tentacles of technology, wherein people (especially marginalized individuals) are retained like farm animals, their cloud data harvested, their work in the retention facility fed to AI models, their dreams commodified.
This book will ignite conversation. The premise, while hauntingly real, is fiction but feels so close to truth. It could happen, and seems especially plausible in the political atmosphere we're now entering.

[Thanks to Pantheon Books, @BookBrowse, and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an advanced reader copy of this book.]

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is an incredibly prescient novel for our AI obsessed age. It is Minority Report meets Orange is the New Black. Following Sara through the red tape and bureaucracy of the carceral state was frustrating and terrifying. Highly recommend this incredibly compelling novel. I flew through it because I couldn’t put it down.

Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel is a masterful exploration of a dystopian future where personal privacy is a relic of the past, and even our innermost thoughts are subject to surveillance. The novel centers on Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American who, upon returning to Los Angeles from a conference in London, is detained by the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA). This federal agency employs biometric data to predict potential criminal behavior, and Sara's "risk score"—calculated from her dreams—indicates she might harm her husband. Consequently, she is confined to a retention center for a supposed twenty-one-day observation period.


Lalami's portrayal of the retention center is both chilling and immersive. The facility, operated by a private prison firm, imposes exorbitant fees for basic amenities and extends detainees' stays for minor infractions, creating a Kafkaesque environment where proving innocence becomes an insurmountable challenge. The narrative delves into the dehumanizing effects of such a system, highlighting the erosion of personal freedoms under the guise of security.

The novel's structure is particularly noteworthy. Lalami intersperses the main narrative with report sheets, transcripts, and terms-of-service excerpts, adding depth and realism to the story. These elements underscore the bureaucratic coldness of the surveillance state and its invasive reach into personal lives.

Lalami's storytelling is both compelling and unsettling, forcing readers to confront the potential consequences of unchecked technological advancements and the commodification of personal data. The Dream Hotel serves as a cautionary tale, urging a reevaluation of the relationship between privacy, technology, and freedom. It's a novel that resonates deeply, leaving readers to ponder the true cost of security in a surveillance-driven world.

I found this book really interesting. I enjoyed the heavy themes of technology, privacy, risk, and the prison system. It's interesting timing for this book to come out as more companies are heavily investing in AI that can have a high error rate without proper testing, usage, and oversight. The MC was a little irritating to me, but I still felt for her. I found her relationship with her husband worthy of a bit more exploration than we get in the book. I would have liked a bit more depth to the dream company - I was really interested in those pieces, but we only get a short few scenes. Part of what makes this novel extra bleak is that the premise is not that far off from our reality, which really drove home the despair the MC feels. Highly recommend this one to any sci-fi/dystopian fans!

Thank you to Pantheon and NetGalley for the ARC.

This book is absolutely spectacular. Totally captivating and well-spun dystopian fiction with a humanity that oozes from the pages. I couldn't put it down.

“We blame the algorithm for our predicament, she thinks, but the algorithm was written by people. That’s who put us at Madison. People, not machines.”

Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy my time reading The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. While the concept was interesting and I did enjoy reading about the main character’s experience in archival work and the discussions around how algorithms and statistics are biased, I left the novel feeling unsatisfied.

I never emotionally connected with the main character or the side characters that she interacted with everyday. The way the story was written made me feel like an outside observer, and I never felt like I was actually engaged with what was going on, even during high action moments.

I also felt disjointed as a reader with the one random perspective shift in the middle of the story that was never really discussed again – I don’t think it added much to the story, and if anything took away the excitement of a reveal that came later.

Readers who enjoy slow, introspective stories might really love this one – just don’t go into this expecting a gripping dystopian read that is difficult to put down like I did.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Review posted to Goodreads on 1/16/25.

Brief review will be posted to Instagram at the end of January in my monthly reading wrap-up.

This book had the potential to be really good, but it ended up being just okay. Long and drug out, nothing at all exciting and the ending was very anticlimactic. I’ll give it 2 stars because I finished it, but I doubt I’ll even remember it next week. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for letting me read this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

A frightening depressingly realistic future dystopia where the U.S. has commissioned a Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) to detain people that an AI algorithm predicts are likely to create future crimes.

Sara, a Muslim working mom of young twins, returns from a conference in London to find herself detained at LAX passport control based on a prediction that she will murder her husband. This is based on an undefined black box of data including that from a Dreamsaver implant, prescribed to treat sleep deprivation but that secretly uses AI to spy on people’s dreams as a predictor of future criminal behavior. Even if you do not have the Dreamsaver device, the government keeps risk assessments on everyone, tracks biometric data, and sets a random score of 500 above which you get retained as a risk to society.

Despite calling it a retainment, Sara’s clearly imprisoned in a decommissioned elementary school with her every move watched, recorded and evaluated. Like the many other women there, she’s held long past the 21 days proscribed observation period. She’s made to do forced labor rating AI-generated content on how human-generated it seems- oh the irony in this!
Sara’s freedom and privacy get completely stripped away as she lingers in a vague, undefined evaluation in which nothing is in her control. It feels like the government version of disappearing people, and no one seems inclined to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm that targeted her or whether it has racial profiling implications. Plus, the for-profit private company owning the retainment centers has more profits to gain by keeping people there as long as possible.

As you read the novel, it feels that you too could easily become unjustly retained in a Big Brother state based on undefined risk data you have absolutely no idea about, and no recourse to challenge. It also deepens fears around relying on AI to make emotionally laden judgments and the extremes to which society might take surveillance tech. You can practically hear the clanging of emergency warning bells as you read.

A creepingly haunting warning of where the next evolution of technology could lead us.

Thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor, and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Coming home from a business trip, Sara is detained at the airport and then held in a facility — all because the algorithm, which monitors dreams, social media, and all of our personal data, has decided she is likely to commit a crime in the future.

With this terrifying premise, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel initially reminded me of the 2002 movie Minority Report, but instead of an action/thriller where our narrator is running around trying to prove their innocence, Sara is stuck in the facility where she’s being held, along with many other women, for observation. They’re told it’s not a prison, but it certainly operates like one.

Sara is determined to stick up for herself and for what's right, even though she knows it'll result in her time at the facility being extended - again and again.

Touching on topics of social media, surveillance, big business, discrimination, motherhood, and so much more, Lalami’s novel is a fascinating character piece and societal study!

This was one of those books that pulled me right in. I was in the middle of another book, but I was so curious about this one and planned to just read a couple chapters - I ended up not being able to stop. I really loved the opening chapters, how they gave us only little pieces of information about how and why Sara got here.

The midpoint had such a strong lynchpin, but then I found myself in a little bit of a slump in the following chapters, wanting to get back to that new piece of information and its ramifications - but my patience paid off because I very much enjoyed the way Lalami rounded out this story.

Absolutely adore this author and will read anything they have written or will write. New favorite! Will purchase for libraries.

I really enjoyed this book, though it took me a bit to get into it.

The Dream Hotel isn't categorized as horror (as far as I could see) but it felt horrifying because the dystopia was too plausible. We may not put people in jail for "pre-crime" yet (do we?we might???) but, as Lalami puts in her afterword, these "crime predictive" softwares already exist. I think the scariest part of this book is the way Sara is treated in retention. She is denied hearings for silly reasons, she is written up and given extra time in holding on the whim of a guard, and she is expected to work for basically no pay, all like real prison.

This book also made me think about the fact that none of us would probably hold up under a microscope. We all have bad thoughts, fights, bad dreams, etc,. I probably couldn't get out of retention either,

"In any case, crime is relative, it's boundaries shifting in service of the people in power."

First book I’ve read by Laila Lalamj and I loved it! I couldn’t imagine a world like this, this tied to AI, and government. I’d be screwed 🤣 and in a retention center in a heartbeat due to my dream, my thoughts. Definitely very very very good!

4.75/5

Think Minority Report, Black Mirror, and Orange is the New Black all thrown together to create this wonderfully dystopian novel. A horrifyingly accurate depiction of where society may be headed, this book had me on the edge of my seat. A must read.

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Thank you Pantheon and NetGalley for the ARC. WOW.

Plot: The story takes place in a future world where people can be detained on a pre-crime basis, based on a risk score that is calculated using various data. Sara is detained at the airport and sent to detainment due to her slightly high risk score, which was high in large part due to an alleged dream that she had suggesting she might be a danger to her husband. Sara is a mom to twin infants, so she is in a lot of turmoil as she seeks her freedom.

Review. This one hit me hard…. in part because the future felt not so distant, but also because I could truly feel Sara’s pain, and I felt like I was in her head the entire novel. This novel takes a hard look at pre-crime detainment (such as immigration detainers) and really the depravity of the prison system in general. I could go on and on about the many thought-provoking themes this novel evokes, but I don’t want to spoil any of the experience. This is a novel that I won’t forget, and I hope the author is nominated the Booker or National Book Award for this one.

5🌟

This book was fantastic. I thought the concept was unique and although it reminded me a little bit of Handmaid's Tale, it felt much more plausible and realistic. It was very frightening to think how easily something like this could happen and how every aspect of our lives could be under control (more than it already is!).

ahhh where to start with this one! Lalami definitely offers a fresh take on themes that feel increasingly relevant in today’s world, but i fear this one was not for me. i really wanted to like it, but i struggled to fully immerse myself—a key part of enjoying a dystopian fiction like this.

i appreciate lalami’s attempt to tackle big issues like racial profiling, societal pressures on women to "sit down and shut up," and how we easily we’re willing to trade privacy for convenience.

unfortunately, by trying to tackle so many issues, the story ultimately fell flat, with moments that came across as very on the nose or overly didactic. while the black mirror-esque premise intrigued me—and made me want to start thinking twice before blindly accepting cookies on the internet—the execution just didn’t land for me personally.

i didn’t love it, but i didn’t hate it either. if sci-fi is your thing, this is still definitely one you may want to pick up!

huge thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to share my honest opinion !!