A review by meadowbat
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

5.0

It wouldn't be a huge overstatement to say this is my platonic ideal of a novel. Ghost story, mystery, socially conscious epic spanning years. It's about the characters—complicit, innocent, and in between—who are affected by a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme. It's also about...life? Everything? Mandel does an amazing job of weaving threads and motifs and callbacks; I kept imagining a giant bulletin board full of cards and thumbtacks, to track it all the way they track crimes on TV. Coincidence drives perhaps too much of the plot (if it was good enough for Dickens...), but it didn't bother me. The way she plays with time—both on the page, as characters slip in and out of memory and alternate universes, and in terms of narrative strategy—is a lesson in technique.