Review: 'Glass Houses' by Madeline Ashby

Sometimes there is nothing more delightful than reading a thriller about horrible people getting what's coming to them. Even if it is at the hand of an unreliable or questionable narrator. Glass Houses gives everything from corrupt tech, Survivor, and men being the worst. Thanks to Tor Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 13/8/2024
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group; Tor Books

A group of employees and their CEO, celebrating the sale of their remarkable emotion-mapping-AI-algorithm, crash onto a not-quite-deserted tropical island.

Luckily, those who survived have found a beautiful, fully-stocked private palace, with all the latest technological updates (though one without connection to the outside world). The house, however, has more secrets than anyone might have guessed, and a much darker reason for having been built and left behind.

Kristen, the hyper-competent "chief emotional manager" (a position created by her eccentric, boyish billionaire boss, Sumter) is trying to keep her colleagues stable throughout this new challenge, but staying sane seems to be as much of a challenge as staying alive.

Being a woman in tech has always meant having to be smarter than anyone expects--and Kristen's knack for out-of-the-box problem-solving and quick thinking has gotten her to the top of her field. But will a killer instinct be enough to survive the island?

In my non-blogging life I work with emotions and so I immediately had all kinds of red flags going up when Kristen's company wanted to use a algorithm to turn emotions into a form of currency. I felt positively repulsed at the idea that it would erase any kind of veil or wall we could put between ourselves and the world. Conversely, I love it when novels like Glass Houses pick up on disturbing trends in tech and rage against it with all their might. While Glass Houses falls more solidly on the thrilling side, rather than purely social commentary, the two come together very nicely for most of Glass Houses. The novel also plays with a delightful kind of twisted pleasure at watching people willing to exploit others get what they deserve. While the ending of the novel, in redirecting its focus, kind of undermines some of it, it remains a guilty pleasure. 

Kristen wakes up in the plane, surrounded by the corpses of her colleagues, not sure how or where they crash landed. As she and her fellow survivors, and colleagues, gather, they gain access to a black cube of a house, fully-stocked with food and secrets. When it turns out safety is still not guaranteed, Kristen wants to figure out what is going on. Glass Houses flashes back and forth between Kristen on the island and Kristen's past. While the present time line is full of Survivor-esque tension, which becomes ever more tech dystopia, Kristen's past time line is equally messy and fascinating and hints at a dark, seedy underbelly full of secrets that led to the crash. Truly, a lot goes on in Glass Houses. It feels like an indictment against modern tech and its obsession with quantifying humanity and making it something you can buy, sell, and exploit. It is also dystopian, in that something bad has clearly happened to the world, in part because of all that tech. We also get commentary on social media, discussions of self harm and suicide, potential space exploration, bloody fights, and more. Truly, I never had a boring moment with Glass Houses.

This is my first novel by Madeline Ashby and, like I said above, I had a great time with it. I got to experience the delightful twist of "these people are the worst, but they're dying rather horribly too". Kristen is an intriguing protagonist, quite unreliable and detached, and yet clearly brimming with emotions. There is also a lot happening in this novel, little hints to an utterly changed world, and all kinds of side narratives. One of these, arguably the B-plot, involved a liaison in Kristen's past, which resolved in a way I wasn't entirely pleased with, although it added a nice few twists. There is also a delightful female rage that simmers throughout Glass Houses, a kind of rage about what has been done and is being done to the world, to people, to women. I enjoyed this aspect of the novel immensely and I cannot wait to read more by Madeline Ashby in the future.

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

Glass Houses is a thrilling ride of plane crashes, mysterious houses and deaths, horrible tech, worse men, and a heroine who remains a mystery for much of the book. You're in for a great and twisted ride with this novel.