📚 Media Watch
What I Read: “The Dream Hotel” is a 2025 dystopian novel by Laila Lalami. It follows Sara Hussein, a museum archivist and new mother. She ends up in a retention center for her dreams, a facility that looks uncomfortably similar to the immigration detention centers now popping up across the U.S.
Set in what seems to be mid-2040s California, the book imagines a world where many workers and mothers have a spinal implant to help them sleep: essentially a high-tech Ambien. The government siphons off this data and bakes it into every citizen’s risk score, which is the metric personal freedom hinges on.
Why It Works: This is an incredibly compelling concept, and it made me viscerally uncomfortable because of how close it feels to the present day. I liked Sara as a character; she stands up for herself in an environment designed to make that impossible.
Through her, the novel underscores how the justice system is built to be punitive, with algorithms empowering petty tyrants and underpaid government employees to strip away freedom at the drop of a hat.
Why It Doesn’t: The novel loses steam at the end. It spends so much time building toward something explosive that it forgets to deliver it. The ending feels like a movie more interested in setting up a sequel than telling a complete story.
Read It? I could go either way. If you enjoy literary fiction or dystopian novels, then yes. If you’re already depressed about the state of the world, this is probably not the book for you.
Rating: ✨✨✨✨/5