What readers think of The Dream Hotel, plus links to write your own review.

Imagine this: you're a working mother of young twins, and as you teeter on exhaustion, you turn to the latest technological breakthrough. It's called Dreamcatcher, a simple implant that stores your dreams, allowing you to gain a few hours of restful sleep and wake up revitalized.

But you're living in today's America, so when you return from an overseas conference, you are retained by the Risk Assessment Administration – a federal agency that analyzes predictive biometric data to assess whether a citizen is prone to commit a crime in the future. Your score indicates you are an imminent danger, and you're sent to a retention firm for three weeks. You are guilty of nothing except an overactive dream life, which quickly becomes your nightmare.

Once I started reading it, I was so riveted I could barely tear myself away. Our protagonist, Sara Hussein, attempts to restore logic in a Kafka-esque world where dreams are regarded as a window into the most private parts of ourselves and are used to identify patterns and make predictions. But in the retention facility, where rules shift at the whim of the attendants, and any deviation adds more time to a resident's stay, Sara cannot make strides in reversing the belief in her presumptive guilt.

The Dream Hotel is filled with the questions that matter: In our quest to embrace the latest sophisticated technology to make us safer, are we losing that very element that makes us most human? Can true freedom only be written in the company of others, those courageous enough to fight back and say "no?" I'm so grateful to BookBrowse and Pantheon for being an early reader.

A single book can profoundly affect our emotions and how we view the world around us. The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is such a book. Sara's fateful situation and the contrast between absurdity and reality held me captive from the first page to the last. And what a satisfying ending!

This well-written story can be considered an allegory of the future. To ensure freedom, we must all work together to overcome corruption, greed, immorality, and bad behavior. To quote Laila on page 321, "Freedom isn't a blank slate. Freedom is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others."

If you are a book club member, as I am, I highly recommend this extraordinary book. I am looking forward to the great discussion that will undoubtedly occur!

The Dream Hotel is set in an unspecified future in California, but it seems believable that it isn't so far from the present day. The possibilities portrayed in this story about the consequence caused by the growth of AI, and the mining of personal data are both terrifying and cautionary.

We give up our privacy to the convenience of technology at our peril. The story follows the main character's struggle to get her life, and her privacy, back. There's lots to discuss, so I'd recommend this book to book clubs and readers of character driven science fiction.

Truly engaging, yet so potentially realistic that it is disturbing enough to make me want to disconnect from all the tech that monitors our lives. The main character, Sara, returns home from abroad and is detained at the airport by the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) whose algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming someone. For her safety and that of others, she is sent off to be "kept under observation" at a detention facility for "twenty-one days." From that point on, Sara endures a much longer detainment and the novel details it all.

As the author describes the methods used to provide information for the algorithm, details the RAA and it's creation based on "preventative crime management" and the entanglement of big business and profits, the reader is shown a potential dark side of our increasing reliance on technologies and what is sacrificed, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience. I found myself relating to Sara, her thoughts, dreams, weaknesses and totally human responses that are tangled and used against her.

Well worth the read. Potentially a good book for book clubs - lots to generate discussion.