I really enjoyed reading this book! The way that Karen dives right into the action from the first chapter makes you want to continue reading. There were several instances where I had to put this book down when I didn’t want to. Also, I loved how developed the characters were in such a short time and how they all become connected. I definitely cannot wait to read another book by this author in the future.

As if freshman year at college isn’t hard enough - starting classes, making friends, and missing home - Walker’s The Dreamers adds a whole other dimension to the mix. A group of teens, all freshman at a college in Southern California, have a dorm party and all of them wake up the next morning – except Kara. Her roommate, Mei, can’t wake her and raises the alarm. But Kara is just the first to fall victim to a strange virus of deep sleep and a state of active dreaming.

Karen Walker is a great storyteller and had me turning pages from the very beginning. Part science fiction/medical thriller, this is an engaging and entertaining read with a growing cast of interesting characters. But it is also a thought-provoking mix of emotions and moral dilemmas. One such dilemma in particular had such a stunning outcome that it just took my breath away.

On the one hand this was a light read but it also gave me lots to think about - recommended.


FYI - I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I guess I should just stop having high expectations when anyone compares a book to Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel . . . I always end up disappointed. Had I not read that book and had I not read that comparison prior to reading this book, I may have enjoyed it slightly more but instead this felt a bit pedestrian. I wasn't surprised, I wasn't intrigued. The writing is fine, not superb, but it just feels like another attempt in a long line of dystopians that just leaves me wanting more.

The Dreamers came out earlier this month on January 15, 2019 and you can purchase HERE.

This time, it starts at the college.

It starts with a girl leaving a party. She feels sick, she tells her friends, like a fever, she says, like the flue. And tired, too, as tired as she has ever felt in her life.

The town of Santa Lora, California, is no stranger to disaster. Between earthquakes, landslides and forest fires, this sleepy college town has seen it all. But in Karen Thompson Walker’s THE DREAMERS, Santa Lora experiences a new kind of tragedy: a highly contagious sleeping sickness that takes over the whole town, trapping its victims in a painless yet terrifying slumber, locked away from the rest of the world.

The sickness begins on a college campus with a freshman named Kara. There are no obvious symptoms, at least not ones that a busy college student who has just come back from a night of drinking would notice. Kara simply returns to her room one night and falls asleep in her clothes. Who hasn’t been there? In the morning, her shy, lonely roommate, Mei, dresses quietly to avoid waking her and leaves to go about her day, avoiding the room and her peers as she often does. But when Mei returns, Kara is still asleep, and nothing she does --- not prodding her, not calling 911, not watching as Kara is carried into an ambulance --- can wake her. So begins the Santa Lora sickness.

With her gorgeous writing and endless empathy, Walker introduces readers to several different characters living in Santa Lora at the time of the outbreak. Each are affected by the virus differently, though their stories are all equally heartfelt and intriguing. THE DREAMERS is a character-driven novel, and Walker is skilled at balancing each of her characters and storylines and reuniting readers with them at exactly the right times. After we meet Mei, we follow her throughout the entirety of the book. When the students who inhabit Mei’s dorm are quarantined, Mei begins to come out of her shell and start her own quiet revolution with a fellow student, Matthew.

As the sickness ebbs and flows, the town becomes consumed by the crisis --- though not as quickly as you might expect. What initially seems to be confined to the college soon spreads through the sleepy town, resulting in various levels of ignorance, nonchalance and terror. As the hospital fills up, the sick continue sleeping and, more interestingly, dreaming. We learn from the point of view of a doctor that all of the sleepers have unusually high brain activity levels for not only the slumbering, but the awake as well. But what is happening behind those flickering lids? And what sort of virus is Santa Lora dealing with?

Through Mei’s eyes and the eyes of others, we watch as Santa Lora becomes isolated from the rest of the world. Through quarantine, military invasion and cordon sanitaire (the complete sealing off of an infected region), Santa Lora becomes its own world, and the community grows increasingly more dangerous. Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, truthers arise to question the integrity of the virus, and news of the “Santa Lora Hoax” begins to spread even as more and more citizens close their eyes, never to wake up again. Walker’s portrayal of the media is painfully timely, and the potential for a similar situation to befall us simmers beneath the surface of every page.

In addition to Mei and Matthew, Walker introduces us to young sisters Sara and Libby, biology professor Nathaniel, and new parents Ben and Annie. Sara and Libby live alone with their father, who is a bit of an eccentric, always planning for the next apocalypse. He is a janitor at the Santa Lora college, and when he learns that he and his colleagues have been tasked with cleaning the highly infectious room, his paranoia kicks into full swing. We watch his descent into madness through Sara’s keenly observant yet endearingly juvenile eyes…until he, too, succumbs to the slumber.

Next door to Sara and Libby live new parents Ben and Annie and their infant, Grace. Their marriage is not an entirely happy one, but they live and breathe for their daughter, whose survival seems paramount in the wake of the contagion. Walker’s writing is perhaps at its strongest here as she describes Ben and Annie’s desperate, primitive need to care for their daughter. When they learn that they may have been feeding her infected milk from the local hospital, their horror leaps off the page. Although Mei feels like the main character in many ways, it is Ben and Annie’s story that will continue to haunt you long after you have finished the book.

As you read this review, you may think to yourself, This sounds like science fiction, or a more literary version of “The Walking Dead,” but what Walker has done here is far more powerful than that. THE DREAMERS is as inventive as it is unsettling, and as intelligent as it is horrifying. Walker balances the real with the fantastic impressively well --- we never do learn the cause of the sickness, leaving the imagination wide open for terrifying possibilities. Through her thoroughly developed and relatable characters, she forces readers to confront questions of love, allegiance, public safety and, of course, the power of dreams. Even those who are not interested in contagion stories will be swiftly drawn in to Walker’s lyrical and high-impact prose. Forgive me for the pun, but do not sleep on THE DREAMERS.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the opportunity to review this book. All opinions are my own.

This. Book… WOW! I was mesmerized from the first page and could barely put it down. I found myself thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it and couldn’t wait to get back to it. Walker’s writing is beautiful, with a dreamy, ethereal feel to it, and the story was so taut and thrilling.

One night in October, a young college student in a small California town crawls into bed and falls into a deep sleep. No one can wake her the next day. Others follow. Before long, the town is under quarantine and in a state of panic. We follow Mei, a college student; Annie and Ben, a young couple with a newborn; Sara and Libby, young sisters with a survivalist father; and Nathaniel, a college professor, through the weeks of chaos and unrest, as more and more fall asleep, never to awake.

This one lives up to the hype. The premise was so interesting and unique, and I loved how Walker carried it through. I wanted to race through to find out what would happen next, but her writing begged to be soaked up slowly. I just loved it! Whether you consider this your usual genre or not, it is so worth picking up.

The Dreamers is a beautifully written literary novel with a speculative bent, presenting a world where a strange, "sleeping" illness is starting to take root. While I found the overall plot a little week, the characters were fairly well done and the writing is sublime.

The Dreamers starts out at a small college in Santa Lora, California where students begin falling asleep and not waking up. They continue breathing, and their hearts keep beating, but they will not wake. As the mysterious illness spreads throughout the town, the story meanders through the lives of the people who live there.

This felt very much to me like Station Eleven, or sort of like The Leftovers (I only saw the show), where the focus is on humanity and how the event effects the people and how they react to it, the different types of people and the different impacts an event like this could have on them. We see the story through the eyes of a myriad of characters - a pair of young sisters, a young couple with a newborn, an older man with a partner in the nursing home, and a pair of college kids. The characters are going to stick with me, one in particular, for a long time. It was a fast read, really well written, and I definitely recommend it.

Karen Thompson Walker is a beautiful writer who wove a complex story that incorporates a wide range of topics, both practical and ethical, about the impact a epidemic type illness would have on the people in a community exposed to it. Her handling of the various issues was spot on.

The story is a narrative of a small college town in Southern California where a new and strange illness strikes a freshman dorm of a college. Initially the plot follows the path of possible spread of the unknown pathogen and then branches out to individual storylines of those directly and indirectly affected by the illness. In many ways this is an interesting look at how we might deal with a sudden infectious disease that could be contained if those powers in charge of public health actually used strong authority to reduce spread of disease. How far are we willing to go with restrictions? Who do we save if resources are limited? What would be the hazards and hardships that each character would face unique to their situation or common to all?

The other fascinating aspect of this book is involving the aspect of dreams. What do our dreams mean? How unique are they? Is the meaning the same for everyone? Do dreams reflect the current time, the past, the future or something else entirely? The variety of dreams and depth of impact of the dreams to an individual was most interesting to me.

I give this book 4 stars - my main critique is that some of the storylines didn’t feel completed. I felt like I was left wanting to know more about how a character felt about decisions made or what another was doing next. Overall, I highly recommend this book.

Such a fun, entertaining book! Loved the original plot and the individual stories. Knowing what happened with several different storylines made it interesting and fulfilling. The ambiguous ending worked well for this story in my opinion. From the authors ending I could draw my own conclusions of things. Will definitely recommend this one to friends. I came to care about each character and could only imagine some of the heartbreak and the resulting future of this town!

I was super intrigued by the premise of this book...I love books centered around mysterious diseases, involvement with the CDC, etc. However, this book was written in a detached manner that made it hard for me to connect with the characters. Overall, I was interested enough to read till the end but did not find myself super captivated.

The Dreamers has been everywhere on Instagram and right in my reading wheelhouse. A mysterious illness hits a college campus in a fictional town in California, causing victims to fall asleep. It’s moving fast and more and more people are becoming affected- is anyone immune? Where will it end? I thought the writing was gorgeous and not too over the top.- but there were a lot of characters to keep track of. I think I would have liked it more overall if we got a little more action with the focus on fewer specific characters- but that’s just personal preference for me.

One warning when reading this book. Probably not a good idea to read it in bed just before falling asleep. This story of a mysterious sleeping sickness which begins to spread in a California college community captures you with its lovely lyrical prose and holds you with the horror of its premise. Starting with college students on a single dorm floor, the condition spreads swiftly and silently. .One minute a girl is living her life, the next she falls into a dream-filled sleep. Kept alive by IVs, the sleeping victims are transported to the local hospital. As more students are felled, the authorities seek to contain the mysterious condition through quarantine. When the quarantine doesn’t contain the contagion, the whole town is sealed off. Doctors and other medical personnel are infected. Fear spreads throughout the town as more and more victims fall into the mysterious sleep. We follow a survivalist and his 2 young daughters, a young couple and their infant daughter, a visiting psychologist separated from her child back home.. The story is more than a dystopian end-of-the-world story, however. As the virus follows its natural progression, the author expands the story to concentrate on the nature of reality. It is a thought-provoking exercise and leaves the reader with much more than a tale of horror. What stays with the reader is the question of what is a dream, what is memory and what can you believe that comes to you through .your mind. This is a story well-worth reading and thinking about.

I looked forward to Karen Thompson Walker's "The Dreamers" because I loved her graceful first novel, "The Age of Miracles," set in California in a  near future where the rotation of the earth has slowed. Time is unpredictable:  the 24-hour day is a thing of the past.  The adult narrator, Julia, tells the story of the first year of the catastrophe from the perspective of her 11-year-old self.

Walker’s second novel, "The Dreamers," also has an eerie, hypnotic mood. It is reminiscent of Saramago’s "Blindness:"  when a sleeping sickness breaks out among a group of college freshmen, the town is quarantined. The infected patients have unusual REM activity and frighteningly realistic dreams.  After the hospital fills up, new patients  are housed in  camps and libraries.  People are afraid of being rounded up.

Although "The Dreamers" is billed as an adult novel, it has the simplicity of a Y.A. book.  Most of the characters are children and teenagers. Two college students escape quarantine and roam from deserted house to deserted house before deciding to help with the sick at the camp;  a couple worry about their baby but are prevented from leaving town (along with thousands of others) by the military; and a survivalist father falls ill, leaving his two girls to fend for themselves with his basement bunker of supplies.

"The Dreamers" is a cozy catastrophe, a distant, less dramatic descendant of John Wyndham’s "The Day of the Triffids" and Doris Lessing’s "Memoirs of a Survivor."  One eerie scene is worthy of the masters:  a student awakens after months to find she has given birth to a baby girl.  She is inundated with grief, because she had dreamed a whole life in which she had raised a son and was finally old.  How can she live without her son?

The novel's ending, alas, is anticlimactic

But It is a  good weekend read.  An escape from winter!

When a sleeping sickness sweeps across a calm college town, the survivors will discover what instincts and ethics drive human nature. Although Dreamers created more questions then it answered, it is lyrically written and poses many philosophical questions about dreaming. Perhaps this book was just too deep for me to love, but it will certainly stay in my thoughts and haunt my dreams for a long time.

I requested this book on a whim and I'm so glad I did! I like pandemic stories and this is such a weird one: people fall asleep and don't wake up. They're not dead and it actually seems like they're having really intense dreams but they don't wake up. And it keeps spreading throughout the town.

Stop and picture that for a second. What would happen if it actually happened somewhere here? Probably a lot of car accidents as people fell asleep while driving. Some accidental drownings in bathtubs. Fires, maybe, as people fell asleep cooking. But how many kids would die because their parents fell asleep and they were too little to take care of themselves? How long before the electricity went off or there were riots because people ran out of food? 

But this doesn't deal with speculation. It's presented in a very straightforward manner. And, as would probably be the case in real life, we don't know what happened or why. (So if a lack of resolution bothers you, don't read this one. But you'll be missing out because it's excellent.)

Recommended.

I thought this was very good! The tone was dreamy without going overboard and the plot was well paced. It reminded me a bit of Station Eleven, both for the theme and the way that I became caught up in the lives of the different characters. The writing was terrific and I will definitely keep Karen Thompson Walker at the top of my watchlist

I would rate this a little over 4 stars, but not quite enough to round up to 5. Mainly because it dragged a little bit, and when I set it down I wasn't necessarily in a big rush to get back to it. But the writing is solid and thankfully not overly showy, and she sticks the landing in a big way, by connecting all of these sometimes disparate and unconnected stories about very different characters, and explicating some big themes while somehow refraining from sounding preachy.

I received an advanced reviewer copy of The Dreamers from Random House through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What It’s About: A girl dies from a mysterious illness at a local college outside of Los Angeles, where the symptoms just appear to be a deep sleep. Soon the entire town begins to 'fall asleep'. This is the story of various people trying to survive and protect the ones they love during a time of an epidemic that seems to be taking everyone out and has never been seen before.

What I Loved: Practically, everything. I love dystopian novels and this was a unique read for me, I've never before read a dystopian like this. The author tracks multiple characters throughout the book: children of a survivalist father, a young couple with a newborn, a single mother with a toddler, an old man whose partner is lost to a dementia of some sort, and college students who want to grow as people (like all new college students do). She intricately weaves the story in a believable way that makes it not only a great novel, but also puts you in the position of what you would do in this kind of situation given each unique set of storylines? Also, the author is an excellent writer.

What I didn’t like so much: If I have one complaint it might be that, the ending could feel a bit abrupt, I don't have any other idea how to have ended it, but the book could have played with some characters stories a bit more and longer, I was left with questions, but its not a deterrent, it makes me want to reread.

Who Should Read It: People who love dystopians. People who like fast paced novels but still appreciate subtlety and character driven novels.

General Summary: A book about an unknown disease that sweeps its way through a California town, you won't be able to put this down.

The sickness began with the local college students and spread throughout the small community of 12,000 like a California wildfire. Students suddenly lapsed into a coma-like sleep, while exhibiting the REM movements of dreamers. The infection “travels best through all the same channels as do fondness, friendship and love.” Those who know their Bible may be reminded of Matthew 9:24.
While not a new premise, Thompson Walker’s narrative style hooks the reader quickly. Lovely prose. Recommended.

"The Dreamers," set in a small college town in California, plays with our understanding of dreams, sleep, memory, time and death. Karen Thompson Walker, author of "The Age of Miracles" (an amazing YA / end-of-the-world novel), takes us to Santa Lora as a mysterious sleeping sickness overcomes first one college student and eventually many more people. Does this spell the end of the world? Will it be a brief tragedy that affects just one town, region or country? The novel unfurls through the eyes of several people who live and study in Santa Lora, each with a different experience of the sickness. In these segments, we see how new parents, college students, medical professionals and a pair of young sisters react to the trauma. Beautifully written, "The Dreamers" is short but brimming with ideas.