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Community comment are the opinions of contributing users. These comment do not represent the opinions of Port Moody Public Library.
Jul 13, 2020mpye rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
<Spoiler Alert> This is not a particularly memorable story despite the reviews above and being on the BBC's top twenty novels of the first half of 2020. St. John Mandel's breakthrough 2014 novel, Station Eleven, was a good read but not an exceptional one. She may be in danger of trading in part on her reputation. With so many excellent novels being published these days we hope for a better standard from our young Canadian authors. Something to justify our high hopes, to get us off our seats and raving to our friends about a story, a writer, a book for our times. The Glass Hotel's characters are very well drawn and the writing is sound. There is a gentle, background resonance of the sea, ships, glass, petty vandalism and service industry roles. So what's missing? There is drama but it fails to engage. As we near the end of the book we wait for something (anything!) to happen to make sense of all that preceded. But it slowly becomes clear we are not to receive that saving grace and the book ends a disappointment.  At times St. John Mandel seems unable to decide which theme is central. Is it a ghost story? A moral tale about the effects of theft on the perpetrators and victims? A life story of two Canadian siblings born in the near wilderness? A reflection on how destitute and desperate the wealthy can suddenly become? Perhaps the story has been exhausted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, particularly in film. Wall Street did it cleverly in two parts. Woody Allen's Blue Velvet brilliantly captured life before and after the collapse of a dubious investment scheme. Wolf of Wall Street did it even more colourfully. We yearn at least for a new angle because the particular shadow these movies portrayed has mostly passed and we now witness the commission of even greater crimes.