The Short of It:

This book originally came out in January 2019, way before our own pandemic hit and yet, the pandemic detailed in this story could have been taken right out of the headlines of today, minus the sleeping illness, of course.

The Rest of It:

The story takes place in the fictional town of Santa Lora, California. Santa Lora is a sleepy little college town (pun intended). Many of its residents work at the local university or at the very least know someone who goes there. In the dorms one day, Mei notices that her roommate is still sleeping although morning has come and gone. Her attempts to wake her are futile. The girl will not wake.

In another part of town, people are falling asleep where they are whether that is in the middle of a jog or walking the family dog. As more and more victims are discovered, the government is called in along with several medical professionals to determine what is actually happening. Is it psychological? Is the water contaminated?

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As the story unfolds and the situation becomes more dire, Walker introduces us to the survivors as well as those who will eventually succumb to the sickness. What does it all mean? Why do some wake and others don’t and why are they different after surviving?

So much of this story resonates with me, given the pandemic that we are currently living with. The way the sickness spreads, the lack of understanding in the early days of the sickness, the conspiracy theories hinting at government control. The true winner here is the way Walker plays with dreams and memory. Some of the survivors remember vivid dreams that they had while sleeping. Some feel they are premonitions of the future, others believe they are memories from the past. What’s real anyway?

There are a lot of characters but they are all so distinct and their situations unique enough where I never felt confused over who was who or what was going on. It’s very well done. I cared enough about each of them to worry about their survival and that says a lot.

If you can tolerate a book about a pandemic, and I must say a sleeping sickness sounds a lot better than what we are dealing with now, then pick it up. Someone on FB said that when they read fiction now, they feel uncomfortable when reading about gatherings without masks and the like since they are so conditioned now to meet safely. Well, you won’t have that issue here because masks are the norm in this story.

Readers are going to compare this book to Walker's earlier "The Age of Miracles" even though they are unrelated. Both can be categorized as fantasy realism, and both are entertaining. In "The Dreamers" we have a sleeping pandemic, which, let's be real here, if the world had to have any pandemic, one where people are sleeping is not too bad. There are many characters, and the big question is, what are they dreaming about? It is a unique and fun apocalyptic story.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Could not finish. Sorry! This just wasn't for me. People love it though! I read Age of Miracles but perhaps my mood wouldn't let me get into this.

Reading this book during a pandemic was definitely an interesting experience. I will say, the authors interpretation of what would happen in society given a highly infectious virus felt pretty spot on. I was prepared for this to be more character driven than plot driven, but I still do wish we had been given more plot. After spending so long with these characters, I still didn’t feel fully attached to them. I think we will forever compare books like this to Station Eleven, and by that comparison it fell a bit short for me.

This book is one of those books that has a premise that sounds so good that you immediately want to read it, and then it actually ends up delivering. So often I feel like I read blurbs on books and they sound fantastic but either they're sort of inaccurate, or the publisher has created so much hype about a thing that the author can't possibly live up to it. Fortunately, this book is neither. 

As I'm reviewing this book very late, I am writing a review through the lens of COVID-19 and while listening to a podcast interview with the author, I was reminded of some of the plot details that now feel eerily predictive. This actually reinforces the feeling I had when I first read the book of it being a completely believable and realistic approach to how a (localized) pandemic might play out. The characters were interested and I was invested in their well-being, but it didn't feel too over-the-top or sensationalized, especially given our new reality in mid-2020.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing a copy for review. 

This was interesting to read given all the COVID stuff going on. This deals with a plague of sleep, I guess, in a small town in California. It starts at a college when a young girl goes to bed one night and doesn't wake up. It makes it's way throughout the town, and we follow several different characters through this. They start with isolating the college, then the masks, and eventually the army comes in and barricades off the whole town. People sleep for varying lengths of time. Some wake up, some never do. The writing is lyrical and gorgeous at times. The characters were pretty well developed. I found it to be an interesting concept and really enjoyed the overall story. I especially enjoyed the end. Rebecca is the first person to fall victim to this plague. She stays asleep for almost 9-10 months. Some of the people who fell asleep have very vivid dreams that tell the past or future. Rebecca on the other hand ends up having...a very intense situation that for spoilers reasons I can't share. Overall I liked this more than I thought I would.

This book was excellent. Walker is an exquisite author. This was the first novel I’ve read by her, and it makes me look forward to her other work. The Dreamers was the perfect dystopian novel, and it felt so real. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

This one didn't pan out for me. I found myself expecting more from Walker. I think it might be the lack of answers given for the phenomenon and therefore there wasn't an urgent driving force for me to continue reading. It just felt a little lackluster.

People in a secluded college town seem to be catching some sort of highly contagious sleeping virus. The Dreamers follows a cast of very different characters as they navigate this virus and the effects it is having upon their town and lives.

It felt eerie to read about the people in this town rushing to the store to stock up on all the things. I found myself having flashbacks to the great toilet paper debacle of late February 2020. I could relate to the fear that many of the characters expressed. I could feel the borderline panic of the new parents trying to protect their newborn baby. These characters are people that I know I will find myself thinking about in the years to come.

This would have been an excellent read prior to the current pandemic and remains an excellent read while in the midst of a pandemic. I would put this up there with some of my favorites in the Apocalyptic-type fiction like Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel or Severance by Ling Ma.

I’ve got to say this was the most interestingly written book I’ve read in a long time. It was 3rd person but there was no main character as the writer hopped around to different POV many times. The story is all based around this sleeping sickness but i was a little disappointed to never really find out why this sleep sickness was happening. I think this book could have had a lot more to it!

I really enjoyed this book!! It held my interest from the beginning to the very end. Loved the characters, and thought they were written extremely well.

A striking read, focusing on a strange disease that sweeps though a small town. A fascinating read that will stay with the reader after they finish.

This was one of my favourite books of 2019. I read and reviewed it in this youtube video https://youtu.be/gKDfZrTsryg?t=114

3.5/5

This was really original. If you like books with a lot of different characters point of view and mystery this is for you. I especially like the little girls stories. I do recommend this but it won't be for everybody. This is not action pack, it leaves youwith questions. Still, super enjoyable and good read!

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for this arc but all opinions are my own! I have mixed feelings about this book. For the most part I enjoyed the writing but I didn’t love the story. I couldn’t connect to the characters and my questions weren’t really answered in the end. 2.5 ⭐️

The Dreamers is an especially timely novel as the world currently watches and waits to see what will happen with the growing coronavirus epidemic. 

At first I thought this was going to be a supernatural story or a fantasy, and I wasn't sure what to expect as those aren't my favorite genres. However, as the pages turned, I became absorbed in the story of a viral epidemic that invades a small town in California. The virus hits randomly, as viruses are wont to do. Many characters die, and some recover. The epidemic brings out the best in some and the worst in others, again,  just as catastrophes do. 

The author did an excellent job of portraying a widespread cast of characters, from the well-to-do to the poor and everyone in-between. The horror of a spreading calamity that knows no cure and takes lives at random, putting its victims into a deep, dream-filled sleep, is well-told. I was enthralled by this novel and highly recommend it.

If The Dreamers, my first read of 2020, is any indication of what my reading year will look like then it will be an amazing one. Karen Thompson Walker provides action, plot, character development and true terror in her dystopian novel. We are taken on a rollercoaster ride that is spurred by contagion, hysteria, 'fake news', constraints of medicine, human emotion and ultimately asked the question: is our perceived reality just a dream? Could our dreams be reality? 

Relevancy
When I read The Dreamers, one month ago from time of writing this review, I had never heard of the coronavirus. As of posting this 500+ people have died in China from coronavirus and tens of thousands are infected. The flu-like virus is slowly starting to infiltrate countries around the world which have resulted in countries closing their border, huge population areas being under strict quarantine, cancelled flights and travel, and the WHO declaring a pandemic. 
I thought The Dreamers was quite disturbing at the time that I read it. Today I think it's terrifying to think that Walker may have predicted the future to a certain degree. It may not be the sleep virus she created for her novel; but any scenario where thousands of sick people need medical care and quarantine will result in complex politics, human rights discussion, and ultimately questions around what is needed to save the human race. Walker adds the further dystopian element that those infected cannot advocate at all for themselves and require sustained hydration and feeding in order to remain alive (assuming they wake up at all). 
As I call this a dystopian novel I wonder if it may be more of a near-future prediction, or even be telling a parallel story to events happening right now, for 2020 and on. This is an interesting quote when we think about morality and reality, The Dreamers is riddled with wonderfully quotable lines like this:  
"..time moves in only one direction. Not everything that breaks can be repaired."

Points of View
Every POV an author adds to any story has a purpose. Often it's to give us a larger picture of what is happening, another perspective on the same events or to allow us to understand why something happened the way it did. Walker uses POV's so well in The Dreamers from: media snippets,  children's thoughts, parents fears and college students stuck at the epicentre of the outbreak. Walker touches on many realistic scenarios that could, and probably would, exist when a quarantine of a town, city or area happens. This includes children whose parents fall ill, travelers with nowhere to go, risk of infection to first responders, infants being born, vulnerable isolated elderly, and every time of person you can think of in-between. The Dreamers provides a well rounded out account of the types of resource constraints, inconveniences and extreme decisions that must be made in a pandemic crisis. 

Realisticness
At times I felt perhaps Walker simplified or exaggerated the risks of contagion, medical diagnosis and other scientific pieces to the story. However I remind myself that The Dreamers is a fiction novel, not based on a true story, and these literary choices are absolutely allowed. In fact given the amount of research that Walker clearly put into The Dreamers it is probably intentionally skewed to make the story easier to consume and follow; plus her disease is made-up so she gets to define the rules. It may feel easy to to nitpick at some of the events, statements or science; I would encourage any reader to consider the complexity Walker is presenting the reader and how she gets many more things correct than otherwise. Not unlike the science and concepts in The Martian; it's more than good enough to make for a (fairly) realistic and definitely enjoyable story. 

Overall
When I read The Dreamers four weeks ago it was scary and felt relevant. Today, just over 30 days after reading, with coronavirus spreading (and killing) quickly, this story is even more of a horror than I first realized in al the ways you might expect and more.
I'll leave you with a quote that I think is the truest statement in The Dreamers. This quote has really stuck with me as it reminds me that a viral or contagious virus isn't the only concern during an outbreak. I believe this statement by Walker will forever influence my future actions, decisions and choices personally and above all else medically:
"Hysteria—that’s the real disease of this era."

Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.

When a college freshman in Southern California starts to feel sick, she assumes she has the flu. She ends up being the first patient to come down with a strange illness that puts victims into a deep, dream-filled sleep. She becomes the first of The Dreamers. Quiet explosions of panic erupt through the community as misinformation about the disease spreads almost as fast as the disease itself. Trapped in a small town, quarantined off from the rest of civilization, an ever-shifting point-of-view offers glimpses into the multiple ways anything — everything from dreams to reality — can be interpreted.

Initially, I was pulled into The Dreamers because of its concept. 2019 was a year of a lot of amazing new dystopian fiction and Karen Thompson Walker’s addition was the most terrifying because it felt the most real. A sudden wave of strange illness overtaking a community, not unlike a natural disaster that forces people to really explore what life and death mean to them. And perhaps it’s that exploration that makes some of the younger characters of the book the most interesting, given their lack of life experience. So much of everyone’s depends not just on luck, but on being able to tap into instincts built into their DNA. Of understanding that they want to survive, that reality is better than dreaming.

What The Dreamers provided was a complex, thought-provoking meal of a winter read. Heavy with possible consequences of climate destruction, the dystopian scenario Thompson Walker crafts isn’t too hard to imagine. The Dreamers is a perfect weekend read for fans of Station Eleven.

A little disappointed with this book. It's about a viral epidemic that spreads throughout a town. The first 75% of the book is exciting, thought provoking, fascinating and absolutely a page turner. Unfortunately, the book just ends without much follow up , resolution and is very abrupt at the end. I do like Karen Thompson Walker and do recommend reading it but was a little disappointed at the end.