Simone and Her Books

I’ve got to be honest, I really wanted to like this one and it was good and interesting, but it didn’t really blow me away.

The story follows Sara Hussein, a retainee at the Madison facility where folks who are accused of committing violent crimes in their dreams are kept for a minimum of 21 days to ensure that these machinations never see fruition. In its simplest form, this is what the book is about. But it’s literary science fiction and of course it’s going to be about much more than a simple person’s want to escape a pretty heinous place for a crime she didn’t even commit.

It’s a common thing we seen shared on social media . A woman getting upset at her husband for cheating on her in her dreams. But imagine if what you dreamed was monitored by the government and assessed that you would be a risk to someone else? Then maybe you would go and kill your “cheating” husband.

That’s what The Dream Hotel argues here. In a world where you can input chips into your brain to help you sleep, but the company has access to your dreams, you know that the worst is going to happen, especially when the government gets involved. Of course, the dream reviewing benefits outweigh the risks. They have stats on how many potential mass murderers and serial killers they were able to detect. The time in the retention center can help calm the mind. They’re able to stop heinous acts before they happen. Everyone is safer this way.

But then there’s the percentage of people who don’t have a violent bone in their body who may be having a stressful week or struggling with a transition in their lives and has that one dream where they kill their boss or abandon their baby somewhere. And like Sara Hussein, who just so happened to have one small dream (even hard to remember) is being accused of here. Because she had that dream where she poisoned her husband’s food, she’s stuck with the others in a retention center that acts much more like a prison.

And yet, the book was just boring. Sara wasn’t an interesting character to follow and while we get to know about her upbringing, her insecurities about being a mother, and even the guilt she carried from childhood into adulthood, it just felt like tasting bland food and desperately in need of some salt. I found the other characters in the book far more interesting than Sara’s perspective. I wanted to know more about the firefighting Emily or the long-timer Victoria, or even Hinton the guard, but the perspective we got was soley Sara and it was a massive chunk of the book.

I wanted to massively adore this book because I love this idea of being jailed for your dreams. In a world where it feels like everyone is constantly on edge over saying the right thing and doing the right thing, it’s an interesting concept to see something happen to someone for thinking. However, it went a different direction and just didn’t really excite me.

I loved getting to know Sara, but I feel like Sara’s life and troubles were quite trivial in comparison to the others. It had some great commentary about the prison systems of America, which isn’t anything new. And I loved the bits about the technology and even the chapter about a woman who goes undercover at the retention center to see if her product placement ads in dreams (I mean, this is America) was working, but nothing really came from all of it. There was so much potential here and yet, the book just doesn’t deliver it for me.

Thanks to Random House for a gifted copy of the book.