BOOK: The Glass Hotel (2020)
The Glass HotelYear: 2020Author: Emily St. John MandelLength: 628 minutes / 10.47 hours
After having read Sea of Tranquility and loving the non-linear storytelling in that book, I picked up one of the author’s previous works, The Glass Hotel. While not nearly as fantastical as the time travel infused Sea of Tranquility, there’s a lot of personality in the characters in The Glass Hotel. These people and events feel real. Even if their circumstances are fictional, albeit based on real-life events, the interconnection of these individuals makes the world feel small—as if dwarfed by the enormous invisible mechanisms that keep the world running on autopilot.
The one thing with The Glass Hotel’s fractured storytelling is that it takes quite a while to figure out what’s going on. Of course, once things click into place, it feels like the setting shrinks down to be exclusively about the eponymous hotel. And then, that’s it. There’s no bigger mystery. There’s no supernatural explanation. Tragedy happens...