Once again, I find myself practically speechless after finishing a book by Emily St. The thrill of The Glass Hotel is that the pieces do eventually connect, from. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. As Mandel writes in the mind of Vincent: It is possible to leave so much out of any given story. Many of the characters are haunted and most of the story is told in flashbacks to various times in Vincent’s life. It is quite literally the workplace of the damned. An ephemeral quality permeates the novel. And, because that man works in the Gradia Building, Station Eleven’s readers instinctively know that it isn’t just a business address named for a big airline. Their worlds are blown to pieces not by the Georgia flu, but by a man they believed to be a trusted counselor, even a dear friend. The people of The Glass Hotel, like their counterparts in Station Eleven, do not know what is about to hit them until it is too late. In fiction, worlds are created and collapsed, god-like, while characters remain blissfully ignorant until they no longer can be. Mandel is having a bit of fun there, creating a world where her Georgia flu pandemic never happened, where these two - along with billions of other fictional people - lived on, blithely unaware of the fates the author’s imagination had visited upon them. One of Station Eleven’s peripheral characters becomes part of The Glass Hotel’s plot, and a more central character in the earlier book appears here as a peripheral one.
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