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Tomorrow is the day we get to start talking with you dear readers about witches and we are SO excited!  This celebration has been in the works for months, we’ve been minimally sharing beyond our chat message for weeks, and we are delighted to kick it off officially with Virtual Book Club to discuss Shelby Mahurin’s debut Serpent & Dove on Friday 18 September at 7:30 p.m. CST.  It’s not too late to register (which you can do here) because we haven’t sent links out yet, to enhance the creepiness (or because we do it day of).  As always, no judgement if you didn’t finish, but no promises there won’t be spoilers, because I want to talk theories for Blood & Honey (no spoilers for this one, just theories)!  

“The Books go under M,” is the second sentence of Emily St. John Mandel’s bio on her website about page. The first being: “St. John is my middle name.” Mandel is a Canadian author who lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. The Glass Hotel is her fifth and most recent novel. Her 2014 novel Station Eleven was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner award. Though Nikki has read Station Eleven, we recommend discernment about your self-care if you decide to read it during these quarantimes. This is my first time reading Mandel and she thrilled and certainly did NOT disappoint.

Let me set the stage for my putting this book on the TBR and how much of my reading life in general goes, to be honest. I receive a forwarded email, text message with a link attached, or a goodreads recommendation from Nikki that will read: “Can you get?”, “Wanna?”, “Recommend.” or any such other shorthand that asks me if I want to add a book to the buddy read list. [Nikki here: I deny nothing. There may or may not also be a Google Sheet with my 70+ holds waiting on Ashley to decide if she wants any of those titles.] Depending on my familiarity with the author and a read-through of the marketing copy, I get the choice to add it to my TBR with the intention of reading it as a buddy read. Often it’s a yes and I recommend it to the digital library via Overdrive. Too often of late it’s been a yes coupled with the realization that my library already owns it and there’s a waitlist. One from yesterday has a 16 week waitlist and multiple copies. I can’t put anything on hold because my holds list is full. Before these most current hold struggles I would place a book on hold and then when Nikki was ready we would buddy read. The Glass Hotel was one of my first recommendations to the library before a book’s release so it ended up straight to my holds list when it arrived at the digital library. But, by the time we got around to reading it for the blog for this month’s survival theme I couldn’t remember the premise. I jumped in anyway.

The first chapter entitled “Vincent in the Ocean: December 2018” opens with: “Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain.” Then a few short paragraphs later we jump to chapter two and meet Paul in 1999 amidst the Y2K hysteria (do you remember that?) leaving Toronto to visit his half-sister Vincent – who is named after American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay – in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Small coincidence that our author’s name has the same structure as Millay’s – possibly…) We follow Vincent through the next 18 years, focusing on a major turning point in her life in 2005 and all the ramifications that a split second decision enacts on the rest of her life.

The trick of Mandel’s writing, flashbacks and flash forwards that are finally tied together at the end, is that we feel the tug of war of time and memory, past, present, and future on the Vincent we know from the first line who has started her story at the end of it. I could not figure out Mandel’s chapter structure, her numbering at specific page breaks – but maybe had I read the dead tree version it would have become apparent over time. Regardless of my ability to understand it, it felt integral to the story, I just don’t know HOW! Ron Charles of The Washington Post said “The Glass Hotel may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker.” And he is not wrong. It is intimate and engrossing and I know I haven’t begun to peel the layers back from the writing. This alone denotes a re-read of this four and a half star book in the future, I just don’t know when. Maybe on a beach or a cruise ship with a printed copy, perhaps with this delicious UK cover? I found such hope for any crisis that comes my way by following Vincent through her life and her decisions, especially how she finally found contentment doing work she enjoyed even if it didn’t come with a fraction of the wealth she had once lived among.

Are you able to find contentment after the times of crisis in your life? How do you define survival and rationalize the decisions of characters (and real people) to survive in their story?

~Ashley

If you’ve been around here over the last few months, you know I did not advocate for reading Station Eleven for the first time this spring.  Now that it doesn’t look like the virus that shall not be named is going to directly end the world as we know it, I say, you do you dear readers (and DM me if you want to know more before diving in).  Reading The Glass Hotel definitely makes me want to reread Station Eleven (it’s not in the cards right now, but maybe soon).  Emily St. John Mandel is an amazing author and The Glass Hotel has me ready to consume her backlist and anything else she can be persuaded to share with the world.  There’s something about her writing that is calm and soothing amidst chaos, even when a book opens with a character falling off the side of a ship in the middle of a storm (not a spoiler, this is in the first sentence Ashley quoted earlier).  

The Glass Hotel isn’t about surviving something dramatic, like falling off a ship in the ocean, not really.  It’s actually about surviving life and hardship and the unknown, sometimes even thriving when the unthinkable happens.  While this book is mostly about Vincent, it’s also about a group of people who are all connected to her in big and small ways, and how they react to and interact with hardships.  We definitely get a taste of the family dynamic and drama between Vincent and her half brother Paul, but it’s not a family saga.  There are also the people Vincent meets through her life as she follows a wandering path through it, most of whom converge at the Hotel Caiette, the titular hotel, during the book.  

I’m also really intrigued by the idea of the counterlife and how it interacts with people Jonathan knew previously, as well as the idea of the kingdom of money and Vincent’s daily recordings, which interest me greatly in a number of ways.  While The Glass Hotel is a story about people and how they interact and survive, it’s also a deep text which I could see as a great book club title.  If you have read or do read this and want to chat, please let us know!  

I don’t want to say much about The Glass Hotel because I don’t think I’d even read the marketing copy (which feels like it has spoilers to me, reading it now) before diving in and had a great reading experience.  I’d heard Anne Bogel (who is a huge Mandel fan) talk about it a few times on What Should I Read Next Podcast, but I didn’t remember anything about it except that it came highly recommended, which I now happily echo.  

After reflecting on The Glass Hotel for a few days, I almost want to call it gothic, but that’s not exactly right either.  It’s not dark, but more moody, almost like the ocean as it brings waves that are peaceful or stormy dependent upon what other influences are playing out at the moment.  It’s a great fall read, with leaves drifting to the ground behind your book.  I give this title 4.5 stars, rounding up to five.  I’ll probably reread it at some point and I’ll definitely be reading more from Mandel.  

Who’s an author that has recently captivated you?  What titles of theirs have you read and loved?

~Nikki