This book was ok. I loved the idea, but it fell short for me. The pacing was slow. The ending wrapped up nicely and I feel like a lot of people would like this one.

Thank you Pantheon and NetGalley for this arc
#TheDreamHotel#NetGalley

Quite an interesting focus on the potential effects of AI, especially in light of recent events. The author seems to have crafted this masterfully!

I feel ambivalent about this book.as much as I enjoyed the plot and the storytelling, I felt completely down by its ending. Sara is married, she young twin, and upon landing at LAX on her way back from a London conference, she gets held for further questioning because her score is too high. Sara doesn't understand how she can possibly have a high score. This book is like an alarm informing us that we are on our way to this type of society. A society that sneaks into our brains and unconscious selves and they get to record everything we do and the behavior we hold.
It's just too bad it ended this way.. way too many loose threads.

“The data doesn’t lie.” “It doesn’t tell the truth either.”

“MY BODY, MY DREAMS” “WE THE PEOPLE, NOT WE THE PRODUCTS.”

Have you ever had those dreams in which you’re falling down an endless abyss and then you jolt awake at the last second before you hit the ground? Or a dream where you do something so out of character and you wake up horrified? Imagine being criminalized for such dreams.

Sara Hussein is taken to one of the “dream hotels” or Madison retention center for three weeks to be watched to ensure she will not hurt her husband. But every action is scored against you. One mistake can leave you with four extra weeks. By the time our novel begins, Sara has been there for nearly ten months. She’s away from her twins who are only two, raised alone by her husband as she cannot get out of Madison. Sara is desperate for any sort of freedom she can get, as she befriends other women and tries to find a way to help them all. This book is a treatise on technology and its invasion of our lives, criticism of large corporations controlling our every day actions, and a criticism of prison systems. The scary part of this novel is how easy most people would agree to such an idea. A minority of few are oppressed, kept for months in terrible centers treated like felons for crimes that have not been committed yet so the majority can be safe from threats. This novel becomes more pressuring in our current political climate and I applaud the author for her ability to weave reality and her sci-fi world into something so realistic that it could be in our futures.

“She wants to be free, and what is freedom if not the wrestling of the self from the gaze of others, including her own?”

“To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others.”

“Freedom isn’t a blank slate, she wants to tell them. Freedom is teeming and complicated and yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others.”

Thanks to Net Galley, who gave me a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I've heard this book described by its similarities to Phillip K. Dick's Minority Report, but other than the idea of punishing crimes yet to be committed this book has little in common with that short story and subsequent Tom Cruise vehicle. Both imagine a darker future plagued by aggressive state surveillance and punishment, but Lalami's vision draws meaningful connections between that surveillance and a neocolonial agenda backed by sexist and racist data gathering that rings all to true in this current moment.

The story centers on Sarah Hussein, a Muslim American archivist and recent mother of twins unexpectedly and indefinitely detained afer returning to the US from abroad. A new technology assesses her dreams and past as a risk for violence through a government enforced and privately operated system for preventing future crimes.

Interestingly, where Dick's protagonist searches alone for exonerating evidence, Lalami's hero struggles and works from within the system, building power through sharing information and developing relationships with her fellow detainees.

There is so much richness here-- both in Lalami's prose and the twisting of the knife aimed to break our protagonist's will and leech her freedom, funds, and sanity. You'll also find threads leading back to Kafka and abolitionist texts that detail the randomness and inhumanity of incarceration, as well as connections to dream theory and work on trauma.

This book was incredibly well done, but it did take an emotional toll. At times I had to put it aside when parallels to the injustices of our current administration were too strong. Although it grapples with intense topics-- surveillance, technology, bias, and control-- it ultimately does provide some ideas for holding on to our humanity.

Review also posted to goodreads.

I was really excited by the concept, but a little disappointed with the execution. Loved the writing style and the themes, but the story got repetitive after a while, mostly during the middle portion of the book, where it felt like nothing was really happening. I found it a bit of a slog to get through, but I did mostly enjoy the first and last 20% of the book.

3.75 stars This speculative fiction novel takes place in a world where the government calculates risk factors based on a variety of risk factors, including the content of a person's dreams. The protagonist is detained on at the airport on a flight back from London and most of the story is what happens to her while she is in detention.

Overall I thought this book was interesting and poignant. Lalami makes good comments on our prison industrial complex through the way that the retention center (they can't be "detained" only "retained" since they haven't committed a crime.) I did find that there were a few points that got somewhat confusing. In the beginning of part 3 I found myself reading about a new character that I didn't recognize to the extent that I checked several times to see if my e-reader had erroneously opened another book. And as is often the case with this genre, the ending is not satisfying or climactic.

Overall I recommend this book. I've read a lot of speculative fiction recently, which has probably raised my bar for the genre. This isn't the first book I'd read if I were looking to dip my toes in the S.F. pool, but if you are interested in the genre and comparing approaches I think you'll absolutely enjoy it.

Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advance reading copy for unbiased review.

3.5 ⭐️ rounded up!

The concept here was super interesting -- use personal data (including dream data) to assess the risk of an individual's potential to commit a crime... and then detain them for a crime that they haven't committed (yet). This gave very near future dystopian vibes and was thought provoking from start to finish, but the ending fell a bit flat for me! During the last 20% of the book, I felt like I was being led towards something huge happening, and then it was just nothing. Had the potential to be so much more!! Definitely seems like a story that's not quite over yet, either.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for a DRC in exchange for my honest review ◡̈

This book kept me guessing what was real and what was a dream throughout. Interesting and suspenseful without being too intense, this was thought provoking and would make for an excellent book club discussion.

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is speculative fiction set in the not-so-distant future. In an eco-techno dystopia, Sara Hussein is sent to a retention center (which is more like a prison) for the alleged intentions of murdering her husband revealed to authorities by her dreams through an implant that was marketed as a sleep aid.

This book felt claustrophobic; this society is a living hell for anyone who suffers from anxiety (like me💁🏻‍♀️). Sara’s retention takes the reader on a journey of her overanalyzing every tidbit of her life in order for her risk score (an algorithmic sum of her life and choices) to go down. When she’s questioned, it is an attack not just not her choices in life and dialogue, but of the uncontrollable whims of her dreams. As the story progresses, Sara suffocates under hyper vigilance, dysfunctional bureaucracy, ineptitude, betrayal, and sabotage all while attempting to get back to her family. The first half of the book felt slow, but after it picks up, I was hooked.

Read this if you liked Minority Report, 1984, or Ripe.

With a pace that is both languorous and tense (not sure how!) The Dream Hotel captures both the monotony of captivity and the infuriating experience of being accused unfairly. When a young mother is detained at the airport for "dangerous" thoughts, this started to feel a bit like a feminist Minority Report (she was only guilty of having homicidal thoughts toward her husband, which ... is that SO odd? Just asking...)
From an uneasy sisterhood that develops behind bars to a realistic ending, this will be a book club pick that's ideal for a group that enjoys exploring the personal side of political topics.

So suspenseful and a future that doesn’t seem that far off! Really made me rethink all these new technologies we have for tracking our health nowadays. Loved this, it’s a great introduction to speculative fiction.

Laila Lalami's "The Dream Hotel" is not merely a novel; it's a provocative exploration of technology's seductive yet perilous nature, and the individuals who wield its power with chilling impunity. The story follows Sara, a Moroccan-American, as she returns from an overseas conference, only to be detained by the Risk Assessment Administration. This isn't a case of routine profiling; it's something far more sinister.

Based on an algorithm's interpretation of her dreams, Sara is deemed a pre-criminal, facing a 21-day detention in a Kafkaesque "facility." Here, the rules shift like sand, and good behavior offers no guarantee of release. Lalami masterfully weaves together Sara's unsettling dreamscapes with the stark reality of her confinement, creating a narrative thick with dread. The novel exposes the very real terror of unaccountable tech giants and their capacity to isolate, control, and victimize.

The inclusion of bureaucratic documents – incident reports, transcripts, and draconian terms-of-service agreements – lends a chilling realism to Sara's plight, highlighting the dehumanizing machinery in which she's trapped. The novel also draws a stark parallel to the US government's ICE detention centers, where immigrants are held indefinitely, stripped of their rights, and left to navigate a system of arbitrary cruelty.

"The Dream Hotel" is a deeply personal and political work, one that ignites both fury and a flicker of hope. Lalami's novel is a call to action, reminding us that collective resistance is essential in the face of such dehumanizing power.

Should you be held accountable for what you dream? Are dreams a foretelling of what you will actually do? These themes are explored in The Dream Hotel.

This book was well written and thought provoking. The author did a good job of building the story around Sarah and the other women. It was easy to become invested in their stories and lives in the retention center. I was a little confused at first with the author's writing style until I figured out the rhythm of her writing and the story.

The story builds slowly and is a heavy read at times. This made me feel the same as when I read The Handmaid's Tale. To me these two books are similar in the way they tell stories of a futuristic, but maybe not too far away, world.

This is a book that I will be thinking about for awhile. It is also one I will be recommending.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.

Set in the not too distant future, this extrapolates our lackadaisical attitudes towards privacy about our data to a frightening, but wholly credible, point.

Sara Hussein is a retainee at Madison retention center not a prison, though alarmingly like one. Like all of the retainees, she was brought there because her “risk assessment score” went over an arbitrary line. She has not committed a crime, but the algorithm suggests that she might and therefore needs to be retained for a period of 21 days to get her score down. But like virtually everyone else at Madison, Sara keeps breaking rules she’s not aware of and her sentence keeps being extended.

The algorithm is fed data from numerous sources including a neuroprosthetic, which Sara, like millions of others, had inserted to help her sleep. But the Dreamsaver also records her dreams and feeds those into the algorithm. Conversely, Sara also records her dreams and thoughts into a journal, which gives the reader the opportunity to understand her

The novel is leisurely paced as the world building gradually unpeels. Early on a new retainee arrives, which gives the author the opportunity to explain a lot of background. Eisley, however, is something of a Trojan horse as she’s bringing more than just innocent enquiries into the facility and, though a catalyst for action, the later diversion to what she’s really up to feels a little bit of a loose end,

The novel wends its way towards closure when wild fires break out and threaten Madison, and the retainees are evacuated. This ultimately precipitates Sara into an act of rebellion that teeters on the knife edge between freedom and even longer incarceration.

The novel is most damning about the profligate way we give our data in exchange for convenience or ease and the way we sign agreements without reading them (and the way these companies can bury shameless usage information into page eleven of these agreements). It also pinpoints the inequities of this justice system, virtually indistinguisable from our current one, as the retainees are uniformly minorities or impoverished.

You might not feel like reading this right now, which I understand, but I highly recommend it as a dystopia just a whisper away from where we are now.

Thanks to Knopf Pantheon and Netgalley for the digital review copy.

4.5 Stars- WOW!!

This was a gripping, thought provoking novel that completely took me by surprise. I went in knowing very little beyond the basic premise, and I highly recommend doing the same as this is a book best experienced with fresh eyes.

Lalami’s writing is stunning, weaving together a cast of complex, deeply human characters whose inner lives are as rich as they are haunting. The novel explores the terrifying possibility of being deemed guilty despite having done nothing wrong. What if your government could monitor not just your actions, but your thoughts, words, and even dreams? How do personal thoughts measure against real world behavior, and who gets to decide if they align?

The themes in this book of surveillance, personal autonomy, and the blurred line between intent and action, are both chilling and eerily plausible. The tension builds masterfully, and by the time I reached the ending, my heart was racing. It left me unsettled in the best way.

I think this had a lot of potential - cool ideas, good writing, interesting character ideas and set up.
There was so much potential, and it did realize some of it, but not all.

First, it was a bit weak on the world-building/technological side of things, as well as in the character building.
Why is Sara only now realizing how everything works re: detention centers, the algorithm, etc. when there is already a whole branch of government dedicated to it, in their society?
I think we also needed some sort of reckoning for Sara, see her have to realize that moral choices would really cost her and would take her away from all her privilege. This never really happens. It reads a lot like a privileged woman discovering injustice and the concepts of resistance. Another option would have been to explore her anger problems - we glimpse her bottled rage and she is so extremely quick to fury. I would have like the story better if we had gotten someone who could have killed her husband, a very imperfect victim who still fights for what's just.
We get an imperfect victim, alright... but a dramatic and out of touch one. That did not make for a pleasant read.
Finally, the end was about community and how freedom is not protected/won alone but then the other women were not very detailed as characters, and that's a bit of a shame.

Then, the structure was a bit jarring: the back and forth between timelines, in the first part of the book or the change of POV in the middle - they did not feel useful to the narration, and actually ended up being distracting, in my opinion. The ending feels very rushed too, with a lot of things thrown in last minute, but not given enough time/page space to be developed.

In conclusion, I think this had a lot of potential, but did not fully realize it.

I had heard people talking about this book and I was interested in reading it. I’m glad I did. The plot revolves around Sara who is put at a center for a crime she has yet to commit. What crime is she there for and what happens is the rest of the story. What really made me unnerved was how real this situation could be in the future. It made me question my social media usage and my digital footprint. It gave me a lot to think about and it’s hard to get out of my mind. Very relevant to our lives.

Laila Lalami takes us to a dystopian future where dreams are mined from an implant that predicts future crime. An AI algorithm then assigns individuals with a risk score, if the score is too high, the person is then removed from society to a holding facility until deemed safe to reenter society.

This book feels especially relevant today as ownership of data seems ambiguous, individuals are unjustly interred, and algorithms rule our lives.

I enjoyed the ending that highlighted the importance of not becoming complacent even in the face of unfairness and that it reminded the reader that we need to stand together for our freedoms.

The pacing felt like it could have been a little tighter but this book is important. I felt outraged and oppressed. The ‘attendants’ (aka jailers) were truly horrible and demonstrated the uphill battle and dehumanization of life while incarcerated.

This book is a warning to our society as rights are stripped from citizens, private data is lost and sold, and those at the top are power hungry and unjust.

“Entire generations have never known life without surveillance. Watched from the womb to the grave, they take corporate ownership of their personal data to be a fact of life, as natural as leaves growing on trees.”

“Freedom is teeming and
complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others.”

Publication date: March 4, 2025
Pages: 336

Thank you so much to @netgalley and @pantheonbooks for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review!

Oh boy, was this a tough read, especially given the unfortunately heightened relevance of all the issues explored in this book. Lalami is a phenomenal writer, but is also clearly very perceptive about the critical political questions being raised today as technology outpaces our own moral developments. Deeply thought-provoking, to say the least.