midnightbookmusings's reviews
496 reviews

This is an overall enjoyable though predictable memoir. 

Malaika Gharib walks us through her childhood in California as the daughter of immigrants, an Egyptian father and a Filipina mother and later to her college years and adulthood. The book is filled with moments of humor, allowing even the emotional and challenging moments in Malaika's life to be read with levity. 

I find Malaika's childhood to be the most interesting portion of the memoir. Given her connection to two cultures, it was a delight to read all about her childhood and how she navigated her Filipina and Catholic side and her Egyptian and Muslim, as well as growing up with a single mother and summers spent connecting and learning about her father's side of the culture. 

Unfortunately, once we move onto her college years and adulthood, the memoir follows a more predictable beat with the common theme and narratives on diversity as typical of these types of stories. Thus, it becomes less memorable towards the end. 

I am ambivalent towards the art style but absolutely love the DIY aspects of some pages for the recipes. Overall, I will recommend this memoir but I probably will not reread it. 

Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for the eARC of The Dream Hotel in exchange for an honest review. 

The Dream Hotel is a chilling examination of the surveillance state, the incarceration industrial complex, and capitalism and even though the book is billed as a dystopian, the setting of the novel feels very much too close for comfort. 

We follow the harrowing experience of Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American archivist whose unpleasant interaction with customs officers at LAX turned into a nightmare when she is sentenced to retention by the government agency Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) which has predicted that she will commit a crime against her husband. As a retainee, Sara finds herself at the mercy of Madison, a private retention center run by corporation Safe-X, where her chances of freedom depend on the whims of the complicated bureaucratic system full of arbitrary rules designed to keep Sara and her fellow retainees in a perpetual miserable, profit-maximizing existence inside Safe-X. 

It is definitely a depressing and rage-inducing read. There are many moments where I found myself needing to stop the book and take a breath to calm myself down at the numerous injustices facing Sara and her fellow retainees at Madison. While the resolution at the end of the book is not the just desert that one may be expecting, I am grateful for the message of solidarity and organized action in the face of corporate greed. A theme that is very prevalent during this time of renewed union strength alongside repressive corporate crackdown on workers in the US. The hopeful tone at the end of the book of course does not resolve or erase all of the injustices, but it marks the beginning of something that can be greater, which is perhaps the best gift Laila Lalami gives us. 

Like many dystopian novels, the horrors depicted in The Dream Hotel are very real. Perhaps the exact technology used is still thankfully not a reality just yet, but the issues of our willingly sign away our privacy and rights to tech companies promising “convenience”, to the growing surveillance state promising “safety and security”, and the ugly, exploitative, and dehumanizing nature of for-profit prisons are integral aspects of our society. And I appreciate Laila Lalami drawing attention to these realities through her story. I hope The Dream Hotel will begin to open the door to these conversations, no matter how difficult people may find them. 

I appreciate how messy this is. Missing mom, nun grandma, falling in love with cousins, this is everything 😝🥰

It pains me to give this 2.5 stars since objectively speaking, this book is beautifully written and the romance, yearning, and longing between the leads are heart wrenching. 
HOWEVER, the consent issue and the orientalism in the portrayal of India and  British imperialism is too big to get past.