The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami: Book Review
Part of my ongoing series "Reading as a Writer" to study what resonates with me as a reader and what craft techniques I can learn as a writer—plus how debut authors can position their work for book club success!
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (buy here)
Publisher: Pantheon (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Penguin Random House)
Genre: Dystopian Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Literary Fiction
Book Club Pick: Read With Jenna March 2025 Selection
The Premise: AI Dreams and Government Surveillance
The Dream Hotel follows 38-year-old Sara who is arrested when the government's AI security system flags her dreams as high-risk. She's sent to a "retention" facility where she remains for months without a clear explanation of why she's considered dangerous. Think dystopian Orange Is the New Black meets AI—a combination that proves surprisingly powerful for exploring contemporary anxieties about surveillance and (one of my favorite topics) female rage.
What Makes The Dream Hotel Compelling for Book Clubs
The Speculative Fiction Appeal
While I rarely gravitate toward dystopian stories, The Dream Hotel won me over by balancing bleakness with hope. Lalami creates a nearish future that feels simultaneously futuristic (AI dream monitoring) and unnervingly current (chronic wildfires, climate disasters, digital surveillance). The novel's central premise—algorithms flagging personal data for human interpretation by officials who don't understand what they're reviewing—feels more than plausible in our current tech landscape.
It's easy to imagine governments relying on biometric data to predict criminal behavior, making this speculative fiction feel less like fantasy and more like warning.
Female Rage as Universal Theme
The novel works brilliantly as a metaphor for a particular kind of middle-aged woman’s experience juggling careers, a partner and kids. Sara's situation—managing twin toddlers, a demanding travel-heavy job, an imbalanced marriage, childhood trauma, and racial profiling as a Moroccan-American—creates a perfect storm of frustration.
When imprisonment without explanation gets added to this mix, it's not hard to understand why someone might dream of committing violent acts. But Sara's constant battle to suppress her rage, please male guards, lower her risk score, and navigate bureaucratic systems creates palpable tension that readers can physically feel.
Writing Craft Analysis: Techniques for Aspiring Authors
Disjointed Structure Creates Atmosphere
The structure of the novel could be called “experimental” as it relies on a mixture of elements and also introduces one additional POV character midway through. Between Sara's retention facility experiences, the author weaves in transcripts, emails, medical records, and other documentary elements.
This structure serves multiple purposes:
Plot progression: Documents reveal information Sara doesn't have access to
Pacing relief: The transcripts or other records provides breaks from increasingly tense scenes
Atmospheric enhancement: Creates a "dreamlike" reading experience by switching media and formats and POVs
This “experimental” structure works because it enhances rather than distracts from the story, and causes an almost dreamlike immersive state in the reader.
Third-Person Present-Tense Narration
As a writer who has cycled between third person present and past in trying to figure out my novels’ narrative voices, The Dream Hotel demonstrates third-person present tense's power to create tension and forward momentum.
Lalami's choice of third-person present tense creates urgency and intimacy while maintaining narrative distance. This technique feels more immediate than third-person past (which can sometimes feel stale) while avoiding the potential claustrophobia of first-person present.
Slow-Burn Character and Plot Development
This novel exemplifies upmarket “Book Club” fiction by combining both deep character exploration (typical for literary fiction) and a pace-y plot (typical for genre fiction). Lalami focuses on Sara's simmering internal world, interweaving dreams and memories with the external conflict of the retention facility and plot points around weather events and social justice. The plot overall is a slow-burn which leads to a satisfying ending.
Final Thoughts
As someone aspiring to write novels embraced by book clubs, The Dream Hotel demonstrates how “book club fiction” can tackle contemporary issues through speculative lenses while remaining deeply human and relatable. Lalami has created exactly the kind of novel I hope to write someday—one that examines contemporary issues like AI surveillance and women’s rights in a thrilling reader experience, wrapped in prose that's both beautiful and accessible.
The Dream Hotel shows us the synergy of story and structure, and made me excited to read more of this author’s backlist.
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