Reading: The Glass Hotel

Last week I finished my third Emily St. John Mandel novel in a row, The Glass Hotel, and it has been a fascinating journey. Mandel has built a marvelous multiverse across Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility: each book has its own preoccupations and protagonists, but characters recur from one novel to the next as minor players, inhabiting slightly different worlds in which familiar events have played out differently.Mandel has a rare gift for plots that are somehow soft and slow yet quietly relentless. This was another book that kept my pulse up and my mind racing over seemingly insignificant events.The crossovers were the cherry on top. I loved that the Georgia Flu, which wipes out most of humanity in Station Eleven, is a minor scare here, contained before it spreads. Or that the Ponzi schemer who evades prosecution and lives out his days in a Dubai hotel in Sea of Tranquility is caught and sentenced to life in The Glass Hotel — where he spends his years in prison…