Review of The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

*The Dream Hotel* by Laila Lalami (2025). Published by Pantheon.

If you’re new here and found this blog through the mysterious powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I’m a dedicated reader and movie watcher who thought to turn this website into a little digital archive of sorts.

I was watching and reading so much that I wanted to keep track of it all, so I began blogging as a way to keep these books as memories somewhat forever.

That said, I recently fell into a period of unemployment, and this blog was a solace for me. Not only was it a way to make a little bit of money when there was nothing else coming my way really, but I found, after getting my finances in order, that I enjoyed sitting down to write blog posts when I had nothing else to do in my day.

Going into 2025, I had a bunch of advance copies I needed to get through. I get emails from publicists a lot and physical books sent to me, but I often prefer digital modes of receiving. I only have so much space in my room, and I’m very much into decreasing the amount of waste I personally create.

That said, The Dream Hotel was an advance copy I was very excited to receive. I was gifted the digital copy at the beginning of January 2025, and I hadn’t read any of Lalami’s work since I was a freshman in college.

And when I started this book at 12 AM one day, I stayed up until 3 AM to finish it in one sitting. I was really into this book y’all, and I couldn’t put it down except to grab some water at one point in my reading journey.

That’s a bit of a spoiler for my review, so let’s wrap up this introduction! I know they can get long and a little boring before the main event of a blog post, so I don’t want to ramble too much.

Much love to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of the book!

Flagged as a risk for committing a crime, Sara Hussein finds herself put in a facility indefinitely.

Our main character in this novel is Sara Hussein. She has two little twins that are under a year old, an academic husband, and a job at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles as an archivist. In the world of the novel, people are given risk assessments by an AI system, and it’s based on everything from their dreams, family history, and so much more based on a secret algorithm.

At the beginning of the novel, we transition from present day to past to see how she got to Madison, a facility for women that are deemed high risk by the system. Sara goes to a conference for work in England, and when she arrives back in Los Angeles, the AI system flags her risk score as being above the acceptable threshold.

At first, she thinks it’s because she is Moroccan American. Her father would often get profiled and humiliated when she was growing up, especially when they traveled as a family, and she is no stranger. But when she talks back to the officers at the airport, they ultimately decide to punish her in some ways by sending her to a facility for other high risk women for 21 days.

This facility, Madison, is a lot like a prison. The women are put into jobs, and if they refuse to work, their risk assessment goes up. If they loiter in the halls or don’t do their hair properly, their score continues going on, extending their time at the facility. When Sara befriends the other women at the facility, she realizes they, too, most likely don’t belong there.

With the narrative focusing on Sara, we also get glimpses of what’s going on behind the scenes as well. There are meeting notes from the people running this show, her medical history, files, and other little aspects that try to show us that there are many other things going on behind the scenes.

Not going to go into spoiler territory with that, but Sara is a defiant woman, just like her mother, and she has some trauma as well involving her brother. I find the story in this one to be fascinating, as it’s clearly a critique of so many aspects of American life right now, especially when we see some of the politicians advocating for all of this.

There are also comments about prison labor and what it means to be defined by an algorithm. Sara, whose dreams were flagged as being a risk to her husband and kids, then begins having more violent dreams because they put these thoughts in her head. Because her dreams are being recorded, this puts her further inside of the cycle.

Overall Thoughts

As I mentioned before, I flew through this book. I thought some of the more multimedia elements, such as the logs, were what slowed me down when I was reading, but overall I could see why they were included in this.

But all in all, I thought the commentary and writing in this were really well done. It’s very much in the moment of America’s political climate, and the fires in Los Angeles happening in the background are hitting home. I read this while the Eaton and Palisades fires were going on, so it was a bit chilling.

That said, Lalami deserves all of the accolades I’ve seen. The last book I read from her I remember being impressed about too, and this novel was just as good. She is such an incredible and talented writer, and I’m excited to see what other work she will put out there in the future.

Pick it up if you interested is what I am trying to say. Go to your library or local indie bookstore to pick up a copy if it’s something that appeals to you; I think it’s worth it if so!

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