The Dream Hotel

“She stands still, limbs straight, eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance; if Madison has taught her anything, it is that compliance begins in the body. The trick is to hide any flicker of personality or hint of difference. From white domes on the ceiling, the cameras watch.”

The phrase “compliance begins in the body” is a personification of control. One of the first things we learn about Sara as a character is that she is erasing her own identity in favor of pleasing the algorithmic powers at Madison. The language in this passage is robotic, emphasizing that behaving well is akin to matching the deadness of the AI that controls Sara’s entire life. Like other dystopian works such as The Giver, what makes Sara human is dangerous and uncontrollable; to prove her own worth, she must become a nonentity. Sara’s limbs become symbols of institutional obedience, and the imagery of “white domes” and “cameras” evokes a sterile, godlike surveillance that flattens individuality—language that aligns with the theme of how institutions use misogyny and control to suppress identity.

“When she was a child, her father made the family go to the airport three hours early every time they went on vacation, in order to allow enough time for the extra searches. He liked to plan for every eventuality, a habit that owed less to his training as a physicist than to the immigrant’s chronic fear of anyone in a government uniform.”

This memory is structured like a miniature narrative arc, ending in a haunting image of a child internalizing racialized fear. Sara’s father is justified in his trauma around airports, and Sara does not escape the events of this novel unscathed; the end of the novel implies that, like her father, Sara will spend the rest of her life struggling against the bias of an uncaring, mechanical government, afraid of the consequences of resistance but more afraid of what not resisting will turn her into.