REVIEW: The Glass Hotel

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on July 12, 2024 • ( 1 )

Jumping back in time a bit to pick up some older reads that I hadn’t had a chance to review yet. Here’s one from 2023.

About the Book

Title: The Glass Hotel

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Series: none

Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Mystery

Pages: 307

Edition Read: Paperback

Dates Read: March 9-11, 2023

Blurb: Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

Review

Hey, back in September, when I reviewed Station Eleven, I said that the review for The Glass Hotel was coming soon! Does almost a year later count as “soon?” Asking for a friend.

Back when I first read this, I thought it was going to be my favorite Emily St. John Mandel book, as I loved it even more than Station Eleven. Sea of Tranquility may have edged it out of first place, but the fact of the matter is that Mandel is an AMAZING writer. I want to live in her brain for just a moment, just to see how her creative process works.

While this book has none of the supernatural or sci fi elements of the other books of hers that I’ve read, there are still small connections to other books that are almost unnoticeable unless you are looking for them (while still keeping each book a standalone story – they’re more like Easter eggs). In this book, we have the intertwining stories of Paul, a drug addict and musician; his half sister Vincent, who has a crazy, turbulent story of her own; and Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor of a hotel where both Paul and Vincent work, who also happens to be running a Ponzi scheme.

This book does move around in the timeline a lot, but that’s true of other Mandel books as well. The hotel plays a prominent figure throughout, since Jonathan owns it and both Paul and Vincent work there. My favorite character is Walter, the night hotel manager who is so devoted to the place that he stays on as caretaker after it closes. At the hotel, the words “Why don’t you swallow broken glass” are graffitied onto a wall. Paul is blamed for it, although we don’t find out for sure if he did it or why until much later in the story. It’s one of many mysteries we are trying to solve in the story, the other main one being of Vincent’s death after falling off of a freight ship.

To me, though, this book is all about different types of relationships. Paul and Vincent’s sibling relationship, which is not always easy. Jonathan meets Vincent and marries her, not as a love match but so he can have a “trophy wife.” We also meet other people connected to Jonathan – investors, employees – and see how their lives intertwine and are impacted by his crimes.

It’s very hard to describe an Emily St. John Mandel book, but it’s also very hard to put one down. This one was brilliant.

GoodReads rating: 5 stars