“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.”
My attempt to “get a jump” on the Booker longlist by reading predictions continues with Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel (Penguin Random House 2025). I’m not sure if it’ll make the list, but I certainly think it belongs there. It’s timely and terrifying, an absolute mindfuck of Chain Gang All-Stars meets Orange is the New Black meets a 2025 Orwell. The reality of the novel is so far removed from present day, and so devastatingly plausible – it’s unsettling and disturbing – a novel I read on edge, with a knot in my stomach.
In the not-so-distant future, in an America that could be, Sara Hussein is detained after landing in LAX following a work trip. While she deals with Risk Assessment Administration agents, her husband circles the airport with their infant twins to pick her up. She is detained because her risk score is high. She’s not committed a crime, she’s not even suspected of committing a crime. But her risk score is too high. She’s detained because data pulled from her dreams has indicated she is an imminent threat to her husband.
It’s not a detention center. But it is. She is not detained. But she is. They are not prisoners. But they can’t leave. Sara and the other dreamers are monitored daily for any changes to their risk scores. Get snarky with an officer? Watch your score go up. Refuse to work? Increase in your score. Hair and uniform messy? You guessed it – your risk score will go up. You will not be released until your score is under acceptable levels, yet you have done nothing wrong but dream. (And Uncle Sam is going to use those dreams to make a profit.)
By the end of the novel, Sara’s paranoia and isolation gets into the reader’s mind. Pacing like a caged animal beside her, the reader also can’t tell what’s real or what’s a dream. I held my breath, waiting for a freedom, the last page, release.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 