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

mysterious reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? N/A
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

It was beautifully written but the story didn't really pull me in. I liked the approach of all these different people related to the events of the book in sometimes only tangential ways, and the way we meet the person who's kind of the main character, if there is one, from the eyes of someone else first. But for my taste, the shifting perspectives revealed too little that was new on each shift - the story was mostly told way before the book was over and what the new perspectives were adding was marginal in maybe the last third or quarter of the book? It might have felt especially stark since I recently read a better version of a similar mold, with a multi perspective story in the world of high finance, but with each perspective unfolding a genuinely new dimension of the story, rather some marginal extra experience and unrelated events.
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