Reviews and Comments

Wow this story blew me away. The future that the author paints and the way that the dandelion networks operate is really a true work of art. I loved the characters, the themes, and the perspective of this book. It gave me a spike in my already-elevated levels of climate anxiety right in time for the Inflation Reduction Act to get passed, so it coincidentally made that win much sweeter (even though that bill isn't perfect).

Giving the book 4.5 stars instead ofb5 because I felt a bit of a disconnect between my reading style and the authors writing style that made it difficult to comprehend some sentences on a first read. Nothing too difficult, just a bit of a disconnect where I had to read sentences a few times and it knocked me out of the reading flow.

This book is really beautiful because it does what we need speculative cli-fi to do - it imagines a future world in ways that inspire hope and action. Particularly as an IT person who works with a conservation science org, this book shifted the way I see both digital networks and also conservation work.

Very well worth reading.

This book is so beautiful, so insightful, and so sad. This story is a deep-dive into the different worlds that we can often fall into. It's an examination of wealth, poverty, addiction, guilt/shame, stealing to get by, making art for art's sake, making art for ambition's sake, greed, dread, and so many more things.

As someone whose family was significantly impacted by the 2008 financial crisis (and let's be honest, whose wasn't), I found that entering back into the world of watching white collar criminals squirm was like a warm blanket. There are a few scenes in the book where various financial criminals are overtaken by waves of dread and it felt like such a balm to my soul to experience their suffering as a reader and then to remove myself back into the cozy world of my own little reading nook.

The Glass Hotel is not a feel-good book, but it's a damn good one.

This book was at times a delight, and at other times a slight burden. I really enjoyed all of the stories that were included in this book, and there are so many talented authors who contributed to this wonderful collection.

The stories made me cherish the relationships in my life. It's really a celebration of love in all its many forms. While some stories focused on romantic love, others focused more on the love that exists between family members.

The one thing that made this book feel like something of a burden at times is that each new story brings with it a large amount of world-building. Stories about time travel have a lot of context to establish in order to make the plot points seem believable. In a larger single-narrative story, much of this work would be done at the outset and then the reader could enjoy the development of the characters/plot inside of that world. In this collection, each new story brings with it the demand of building a new mental framework for understanding the story. Some of the stories are very dense with this kind of "just keep reading and eventually it will make sense and you will love it" kind of stuff, and on its own there's nothing wrong with that. But that's the reason why I'm putting this at a 4/5 instead of a 5/5.

All in all, I highly recommend reading this collection (at your own pace).

Trigger warning for this book at the end of the review

I really enjoyed this book. The world and character building were first-class, and I completely loved the way that the author integrated themes of class struggle and capitalist exploitation of the working/poor.

Having said that, there were a few things that lowered this book from my list of "best reads of the year" to the slightly larger pile of "meh, it was pretty good".

First, there were so many times that I found myself finishing a chapter muttering "oh goddammit" because of some unexpected plot twist. These are great if they're interspersed throughout a story at strategically important turning points, but it felt like Bennett was a little too generous with these unexpected narrative surprises. It felt like a constant struggle where the vast majority of the chapter would build the narrative one step forward for the characters, and then the last few paragraphs would be two giant leaps backwards in their quest. Like I said, I get that this is important for building the story; after a while though, it can feel exhausting as hell for the reader.

Second drawback of the book from my perspective (and why I think it might be potentially triggering for some) - there were a handful of scenes where the main characters were enslaved and/or lost control of their bodily autonomy to the villain(s). Now, these scenes fit in really well with the overarching theme that capitalism steals our very minds and bodies to work against our own best interests, but they were very unpleasant to read. I understand that not every book is supposed to be sunshine and rainbows, and I believe that these scenes did a good job of accomplishing what the author intended them to do. However, I think that these scenes could be triggering for readers who have experienced abuse in their past.

Trigger warning: this book contains themes and scenes including slavery, physical abuse, torture, and loss of both physical and mental autonomy to the villains