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A review by corinnekeener
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
2.0
This one just wasn't for me, I think. I'm also not entirely able to collect my thoughts so here goes an incomprehensive list of some of things I felt snarkiest about:
The jacket copy of this novel will have you believe that all of the plot turns on some ~mysterious~ graffiti scrawled into the window of the titular glass hotel. The graffiti in question is particularly verbose, "Why don't you swallow glass", and it's maybe targeted at someone, but not at all at any of the people who actually see it who are just people in the hotel lobby well after midnight. This somehow has the power to make an angsty young bartender dissolve into tears.
The extremely rich are extremely boring. The angsty young bartender, later that shift, meets a very rich Bernie Madoff-type man and immediately runs off with him to be his fake wife. Anything that had been interesting about this young woman is immediately washed away. Now she spends all her time shopping in expensive stores for roughly 200 pages.
Mostly this book feels like an elaborate prank to get into a record book for use of the term "pied-à-terre."
But as it is, lots of people are enjoying this. Could be the moment. I don't particularly like anything right now. So your mileage may vary.
The jacket copy of this novel will have you believe that all of the plot turns on some ~mysterious~ graffiti scrawled into the window of the titular glass hotel. The graffiti in question is particularly verbose, "Why don't you swallow glass", and it's maybe targeted at someone, but not at all at any of the people who actually see it who are just people in the hotel lobby well after midnight. This somehow has the power to make an angsty young bartender dissolve into tears.
The extremely rich are extremely boring. The angsty young bartender, later that shift, meets a very rich Bernie Madoff-type man and immediately runs off with him to be his fake wife. Anything that had been interesting about this young woman is immediately washed away. Now she spends all her time shopping in expensive stores for roughly 200 pages.
Mostly this book feels like an elaborate prank to get into a record book for use of the term "pied-à-terre."
But as it is, lots of people are enjoying this. Could be the moment. I don't particularly like anything right now. So your mileage may vary.