GLASS HOUSES by Madeline Ashby – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Glass Houses by Madeline Ashby
Published by Tor Books on August 13 2024
Genres: Adult, Science fiction
Pages: 272
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: A weird take on the locked room mystery, Glass Houses was entertaining and unique despite some flaws.

“When you were a woman in tech, you could either emphasize the woman or the tech, and the founders of Wuv clearly favored the former. A woman could do the whole jeans and ironic T-shirts thing, but the jeans had to be skinny and the woman had to be even skinnier.”

Glass Houses is one of the weirdest, fucked up stories I’ve read in quite a while. I was a little worried about all the mixed reviews on Goodreads, because I absolutely loved Madeline Ashby’s Company Town, but I’m happy to say this ended up working for me, even though it’s flawed and doesn’t always make sense. Imagine a locked room mystery set-up—ten people survive a plane crash and end up stranded on a deserted island, but there’s a killer in their midst—combined with a high concept story about a tech start up company, and a main character with a strange and tragic backstory, and you get this original and highly bizarre sci-fi tale.

Kristen works for a tech start-up called Wuv, a company that wants to turn emotions into currency. Wuv is the brainchild of Sumter Williams, an eccentric billionaire who hires Kristen as his Chief Emotional Manager (and so beings the weirdness!). After closing an acquisition deal, Sumter takes his employees on a celebratory retreat, but unfortunately something goes wrong and their self-flying plane crashes on a deserted island, killing several of Wuv’s employees. The survivors, including Kristen, Sumter, and eight others, head for the only structure on the island, an ominous black glass building, hoping to find food and water.

Once they figure out a way inside, they do indeed find survival supplies and even hot running water, but something about the house is odd. The kitchen cabinets will only open for the men, and there’s a huge skeleton of a prehistoric turtle hanging in the entryway. Sumter is acting very strange for a man whose plane just crashed, and then people start dying. Is there some kind of malevolent force on the island? Or is one of them the killer? Kristen begins to suspect what might be going on, but can she figure it out before she becomes the next victim?

In alternating chapters, the story flashes back to when Kristen first started to work for Wuv, how she met an enigmatic man named Anton, the recent suicide of a Wuv employee named Sheila, and the events leading up to the acquisition of Wuv. Little by little, Ashby weaves together all these threads and shows how everything is connected. Well, mostly. We do get answers, but it takes most of the book to get there. When I started reading Glass Houses, I thought the focus was going to be on the events taking place in the present—the plane crash and what happens to the survivors on the island. But Ashby spends most of her time in the past, and the locked room mystery on the island is almost a side plot. The real story focuses on Kristen and her childhood trauma—her famous parents died in a house fire when she was a teenager, and she tried to rescue them but got severely burned in the process. She has terrible scars from that ordeal and her mental health isn’t that great either. And while I wanted more of the murder mystery, by the end of the story I understood why Kristen’s backstory was so important.

I will say this about Madeline Ashby, though: she is a super smart woman and an excellent writer. Not only does the story include fascinating futuristic ideas, but she makes everything seem completely plausible. The idea of taking human emotions and using AI to calculate their worth sounds crazy, but somehow she pulled it off and made me believe it could be a “thing.”

As for the characters, they were a pretty unlikable bunch, so readers who don’t enjoy unlikable characters will probably struggle with this book. I’ll just say it: Sumter is an sexist jerk, and he sort of reminded me of Elon Musk. He seems to think that Kristen owes him something, like hopping into bed with him for starters. I found him to be repulsive, as he’s a very touchy feely kind of man, and I couldn’t figure out why Kristen wanted to work for him.

Kristen fascinated me, even though she’s a bit on the cold side. She’s badly scarred from trying to save her parents from the fire, and the scars seem to define her personality. She’s also famous in a way. Her parents were famous “streamers” and she grew up on camera, so she has a big social media following. Sumter hired her because of that fame, thinking it would propel Wuv into the spotlight, which it did, in a way.

And then there’s Anton, the mysterious man who Kristen meets by accident (or so she thinks) and starts an affair with. I couldn’t figure out why he was even in the story, but eventually his presence make sense—sort of.

I did love the bloody showdown at the end, although when Sumter’s ultimate goal is revealed, it came across as ridiculous. By the end I was convinced that both Kristen and Sumter were completely nuts, and a twist late in the story confirmed that. 

Still, despite its negatives, I can’t help but like this story. Ashby’s themes of sexism in the workplace and how tough it is for women in the tech industry ring true, and although Kristen seems to be the ultimate victim, she ended up surprising me. Not everyone is going to like this book, but readers who are looking for something different might want to check it out.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.