The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Reviewed by GGGinny

What I drank: white wine. Ive been om a seltzer kick but I wanted to get back to my roots.

Goodreads Overview:

From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, a captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent’s half-brother, Paul, scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship. Weaving together the lives of these characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts. 

Drunk Thoughts:

• Vincent, as a main character, was fascinating. And I just wanted good things for her.
• This book did a great job of making otherwise shitty people really compelling.
• Even the shitty people I wanted to do well.
• This book also had a toich of magical realism
• And the jumping around in the time stream made the entire thing feel slightly eerier while keeping me off balance.
• I dont have much to say about world building which probably means it was solidly done
• The perspectives jumped around a lot which made for a full picture of what happened. It was kind of awesome
• But this is definitely a book that would need yo be read again to really understand whats going on
• Which is a rare feeling for me.

What I’d Pair it With:old fashioned, something a little smokey with a wide variety of how it could be put together

Rating: 4/5 (I enjoyed this, but not as much as Station 11)