Just Finished Reading The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel, just came out two months ago...I'm not sure how I came across it but I managed to check it out and have just finished reading it.  It uses the theme of the fraudulent Ponzi scheme that financier Bernie Madoff built to rip off his investors to the tune of billions of dollars, financially ruining them when it finally all crashed.  In this novel, the fictional culprit...caught at about the same time, 2008...is Jonathan Alkaitis.  But although it covers his experiences, the story jumps around in a helter-skelter fashion back and forward in time between a number of characters, chief among them half-siblings Paul and Vincent (a woman), young Canadians each with their own peculiar personalities and hangups.  The story brings the aforementioned three...along with a handful of other characters whose lives are featured...together one night at a remote, very fancy hotel owned by Alkaitis on a British Columbia island: the Caiette.  It is the threatening graffiti, brutally drawn with acid on the hotel lobby window, that ties the story and characters together...but it takes some patient reading to discover this.  If you're looking for a linear plot development and a clear resolution at the end, you're bound to be disappointed in The Glass Hotel.  But if character development and study of people's inner motivations and narratives attracts you in a story, then I think you'll be pleased.  At a certain point in the novel I realized that the latter would be the case here and I flowed with it, adjusting my expectations accordingly.  It's not for everyone, but it was intriguing enough for me...you might agree...