We’ve got a double review for you! I was considering making this into two different reviews, but honestly my reading experience of these two are entirely connected. I not only read Sea of Tranquility immediately after The Glass Hotel, but it was 100% crucial to my enjoyment of the sequel. Keep reading this book review for my full thoughts.
Summaries
The Glass Hotel
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.
Sea of Tranquility
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
Review
The Glass Hotel
Not going to lie, my initial reactions after finishing The Glass Hotel was like, wait what?? I just kind of liked it, but I never felt anything strong for the book. There was this reflective tone to the book, to what was happening. While I could deeply empathize with this feeling of our life falling apart, from almost seeing it from a bird’s eye view, I was having a difficult time connecting with the characters. Mostly because I felt like things were happening to them without a lot of introspection – which is normally what I Need.
For the longest time, it felt like we were circling a story. Almost like those birds you see in the air just gliding waiting to strike. And when it eventually struck and things came crashing down, I was left a little like, “well that took a while”. At it’s heart, The Glass Hotel examines what people will do to escape and for ambition. How we can have this collateral damage without ever knowing it. And a question I kept having was, “can a person know and not know something at once?” So for me, it was just a case of a little too little too late. The questions I had that made me think – which I genuinely enjoyed – were to ask what each of our morally questionable line is.
But then I read Sea of Tranquility and it all changed.
Sea of Tranquility
The ways in which Sea of Tranquility weaves together with The Glass Hotel is brilliant. At the very beginning, I could not get over the little touches, all the ways in which these threads from our lives, and the past, were echoing throughout. I had heard that you should read them chronologically and that they all made sense together, but I underestimated how important that is. So let me echo this to you, READ THEM IN ORDER.
What begins as pockets of thin-ness between realities and places, morphs into something very meta and convoluted but which feels like reward. Not only that, but this one is definitely science fiction and I loved that! The SF questions that occurred – I won’t spoil them here for you – haunted me months after finishing. Sea of Tranquility became fascinating and firmly rooted in SF.
Additionally, I had the best connection to Gaspery. The ways he has to figure out his own ethical lines, his own limitations of what he will not do, and his introspection. Sea of Tranquility is about the patterns of life, fate and destiny. Mandel tells a story about the fascination with the end of our world, with this idea of a “life” and what it means to live a life well lived.
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Find The Glass Hotel on Goodreads, Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org & The Book Depository. Find Sea of Tranquility on Goodreads, Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org & The Book Depository.