Title: The Glass Hotel

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Publisher: Knopf 2020

Genre: Literary Fiction

Pages: 321

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Ebook

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.

I was so incredibly excited to read this one. I adored Station Eleven and was looking forward to Mandel’s next piece of fiction. Unfortunately this one felt so incredibly flat to me. There’s hardly any plot to speak of, but that was to be expected from her previous work. I didn’t think I was going to read a plot-driven book and that would have been okay. I need to really dive into the lives of interesting characters. This book did not have any. Every single character we met was terrible. I couldn’t root for any of them. I couldn’t make myself care about any of them. I just wanted them all to go away. Beyond that, I’ve found that I really don’t care about reading books where rich people behave badly. I just don’t care. I found no hope in this book. Definitely not for me at all.

Next up on the TBR pile: