Just realized that I never reviewed this book or changed the status on GoodReads after I read it a few days ago.
Definitely a page-turner and loved the premise but it fell short in a few areas. First, the positives: The story line of a sleeping virus drew me in and I enjoyed the beautiful writing. I liked some of the characters but felt short-changed a few times on some of them. The story stayed with me. The ending came fast but that was not a negative.
The negatives I guess are because perhaps I’ve expected too much. Mainly, I wanted to know what they were dreaming and why. And, why did some wake up and others did not. However, that did not detract too much from the whole.
That said, definitely worth the time reading it and I will also look into another by this author. I noticed a previous novel, “The Age of Miracles” by this author and a quick peek at the description revealed another different kind of story, just my ‘cup of tea’.
Thank you to the publisher, NetGalley and the author for the privilege of reading an advance copy.

On the surface The Dreamers is a dystopian novel about a mysterious new illness that slowly infects a small, secluded town in California. However, when you get deeper into the book you realize that the book is more about the characters and the trials they face during this epidemic.

I knew maybe 50 pages in that this book was going to be a good one for me. Even still, it exceeded my expectations. Not only did it have an interesting and original dystopian plot, but it touched on many other important points as well. Subjects that we can all relate to such as family, friendship, anxiety, and trust. I can’t decide which character I liked more, even though they were all so very different. I wanted so badly for all of them to be safe, even as this invisible threat closed in on their town. If you like dystopian novels definitely check this one out!

I couldn’t put this one down. The Dreamers is moody, engaging, and creepy. The story centers on Santa Lora, a fictional California college town, where a new and unfamiliar virus strikes and begins to spread, leaving victims who are asleep but appear to be dreaming, unable to be woken. As the mystery grows and the town is quarantined, the characters wrestle with their mortality and the ways in which we make meaning of the world around us. •

Walker really nails the tension and emotional resonance, as we follow multiple characters and storylines navigating the growing public health crisis. It’s a powerful and heart wrenching exploration of fear, memory, love, and the choices we make for the safety of our loved ones and ourselves. •

Highly recommended. This one has been all over bookstagram, and for good reason. Looking forward to talking about this one. Did you read it?! If so, share your thoughts! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Also, thank you to @netgalley and @randomhouse for the eARC in exchange for my honest review! •

Karen Thompson Walker’s writing is magical, even during the most tragic moments in the book I found myself highlighting beautiful quotes. The narrative style of the book makes it impossible not to get sucked into the story. I think this would be a great one to listen to as an audiobook. This is the story about a town inflicted with a mysterious virus, but it’s really the story of human experience. The Dreamers is a character driven book, and there are quite a few characters, but even with the alternating chapters it’s not hard to follow their stories. I felt emotionally attached to each of the storylines, all beautiful and heartbreaking in their own ways.

I’ve always been a fan of dystopian stories, but after reading Station Eleven last year I had a whole new appreciation for them. I feel like I’ll always hunt for books that have the same beautiful, haunting feeling that Station Eleven has, and The Dreamers definitely lived up to my expectations. 5 stars!

Karen Thompson Walker’s sophomore novel, The Dreamers, took me by storm. Excuse the cliché, but it swept me up inside of an imaginative world that was close enough to reality as to not be science fiction but close enough to an altered reality as to border dystopia. The sickness sweeping the town took on a life of its own—the true antagonist in this novel. It left behind an eerie quiet upon this Southern California town, which Walker punctuated beautifully— disconcertingly: an explosion here, a dog still on its leash wandering the silent neighborhood there, a man sleepwalking in the middle of the road who may or may not meet his end with a vehicle. I wasn’t sure that I would fall in love with this novel from the start. Yet, Walker’s un-embellished method of storytelling grew on me gradually but commendably in such a way that I hadn’t realized I’d fallen for this book until I was already hopelessly at its mercy, drawn into its altered reality completely.

Mei is a freshman in college when the sleeping sickness chokes the small town she lives in. She’s suffering from typical first-year introvert blues: not fitting in, being generally ignored by the entire student body around her. Until. It starts in her dorm, on her floor, with the pretty, lip gloss smacking girls and popular boys falling prey to sleep one by one. When a panic stirs and the students are quarantined, it’s not long before they find a way to break out of captivity and scatter, running in all directions, back into the world—carrying the sleeping sickness sweeping across the town with them.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Dreamers. It is a thoughtful read featuring a cast of odd-balls. The social outcasts and unconventionalists reign supreme within these pages, offering the reader an inside glimpse into a young couple’s broken marriage, a motherless household of doomsday preppers, and one man’s sorrow at the loss of his partner.

I will say that I wish the book had gone further, pushed the bounds just a tad more. That is both a compliment and a critique simultaneously, the former in that I wanted to read more about these characters, and the latter in that I wish Walker had explored this avenue she started to veer on toward the end: an avenue lined in nightmares and premonitions.

“Like just now,” he says. “When you came into the kitchen, I had the sensation that you were standing beside me, but that was before you walked in.” It’s like everything’s out of order, he says, like there’s something wrong with the sequence, as if the future were coming before the past.

I wonder where this path could have led us, what wondrous views we could have seen from that perch. Alas, Walker took us to the edge of that cliff—far enough so that we could see what could be—but never pushed us into the arms of what was below. Some would praise her for such restraint, while others would yearn to place their feet upon that path less taken. I, myself, am on the fence, one foot hanging midair of what could have been, the other solidly placed in the reality of what the novel offered.

The Dreamers moved me. I thought about this book when I was away from it and turned the pages swiftly, hungrily, when I was in its company. I recommend this novel to lovers of fiction writing, particularly dystopian fiction or narratives featuring altered realities and small towns in a panic. I liked the compactness of the book, the fact that every word, every chapter, had its place in moving the narrative forward. But, I would not have objected to being taken further into this new dimension that was presented but only tepidly explored. All in all, Karen Thompson Walker and The Dreamers earned a solid 4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

Many characters affected by the interesting premise of a slow moving virus that induces long term sleep & sometimes death. In the end I was dissapointed with the resolution and didn't care about the fate of the dreamers.

Books about dreams always entices me, particularly if it's fiction. I feel like my life has been expanded by the craziness of my own dreams so I find it interesting to play around with that in fiction. I have yet to find a good, decent book that encapsulates dreams in an interesting and engaging way. Usually something is wrong, or off about it and I don't enjoy it as much as I'd like. Until this book, mostly.

Karen Walker wrote a book that incorporated dreams in a unique way, but the book is more about the virus that causes people to sleep. The virus starts very mysteriously with one girl in a small college in the Southern California mountains. It's a small community and the college dominates, and soon the virus does as well.

The book follows several different characters, a freshman girl who is an outsider, but roommates with the first girl who got sick. There's a couple of young girls with a father who works at the college and is a doomsday-prepper. When he gets sick they are resourceful and take care of themselves. Their next door neighbors are new to the town and college, and have a newborn they are figuring out how to manage along with their relationship that's been rocky. There's briefly, I think too briefly, a psychiatrist from Los Angeles area who comes in early to help determine what is going on, before they know it's a virus, they think it could be a psychological contagion, like yawning.

Having these different view points was a great way to get more from this scenario. Yes, other books about outbreaks and containment, or not, have appeared before. But this one has a unique take on it, and as I mentioned before, I like the dream aspect. I don't want to reveal too much about it, but I liked that part and could have done with more of it.

I read the book fairly quickly and found it engaging. I think it helped to read it quickly, keeping all the parts vividly in your mind. There are some parts that got glossed over or wondered what it had to do with the entire story. And one part of the book really was odd, but interesting. It is fiction, I sometimes have to remind myself that when reading...yes, suspend some disbelief.

I enjoyed reading this book, spending time with the story. There were those small parts that made the book not quite a five star read.

[4.5 stars]

Many people raved about Walker’s debut novel, The Age of Miracles, but I missed that one. I’ll definitely be going back to it, though, because I almost 5 star loved The Dreamers! It’s like a more literary version of Megan Abbott’s The Fever (which I loved). The Dreamers is not a thriller by any means, but it still had me on the edge of my seat with incredible tension and suspense. Walker did a fantastic job conveying the fear that an epidemic of a never-before-seen disease can cause…and it reminded me of the early days of the AIDS epidemic when the general public didn’t know how it was transmitted, etc. This is a novel about fear, hysteria, isolation, and human behavior in the face of those things. And, I love her writing style…it’s simple, yet incredibly compelling, and sets a just slightly mystical mood (which is about all the mystical I can tolerate). The Dreamers has been compared to Station Eleven (my review) and I’d say the epidemic portion of the book is somewhat similar, but overall The Dreamers shines on its own. My only small complaint (and what made me rate it 4.5 rather than 5 stars) was a somewhat anti-climactic ending. This one has a shot at making my Best Books of 2019 list!

I received an advanced copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. So here it is for The Dreamers, which was released this week.

Frankly this was going to be a hard sell for me. The blurbs compared it to the huge hit, Station Eleven, which I admired but did not love and I have grown weary of the post-apocalyptic genre. It has been overdone and as many have noted the fantastical separation we once had reading these books is no longer there, with reality quickly aligning with the nightmares authors once created out of thin air.

For the most part, The Dreamers is a unique take. Instead of a collapsing world, Walker focuses on a small Californian town overcome by a mysterious disease that leaves its victims alive but asleep, prisoners to dreams that may be premonitions or just longings for past experiences long buried in the subconsciousness. Walker takes around the town, introducing us to college students at the epicentre of the outbreak, various families broken up by the illness, senior lovers hoping to be taken to the same dreamland after the ravages of senility have taken their toll.

Much of the time I was somewhat bored by Walker's plot. It did not meander or get bogged down by too ornate language, it pushed forward at a nice pace, keeping the various plotlines fresh in the mind of the reader. But frankly, most of the characters were quite boring, too quaint, too normal, with all shady elements of the past unexplored. As Dwight Garner's NY Times review notes, all the characters are "exceedingly nice" and none say or do anything particularly interesting. While sharing Station Eleven's desire to explore the unexplored elements of human experience in moments of societal collapse, the agents of that exploration that Walker relies on hold none of the sharpness or dark malevolence that Emily St. John Mandel managed to imbue her characters.

However, something beautiful comes about toward the end of the book as the world of dreams and their meanings begin to surface. Walker's prose rises to another level and the questions she asks about how our dreams convey or filter how we understand our experiences, especially those moments of crises, is truly beautiful. It turned a mediocre reading experience to one where I had to go back to read passages, mesmerized by the writing and the dalliance into the subconsciousness Walker wants to explore.

I'm happy I powered through, as I would have lost the most powerful elements of the book had I abandoned. In the end, The Dreamers is more than just a new Station Eleven, and should be reckoned on its own merits, giving credit to the questions Walker wants to explore, which are not conventional to the genre and which offer important insights into the human condition.

One night, a freshman at a small college in a small town in SoCal stumbles home from a party not feeling so good. She falls asleep, and never wakes up. When more students in her dorm start to fall asleep, the girls room are Mei finds she is at the center of the panic now taking hold the town.

A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.

Doctors discover that those who are affected by the illness display unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

This book hooked me right away. I loved Karen Thomas Walkers first book and was so excited when The Dreamers was announced. It is a beautiful and thoughtful novel. It is thought provoking and challenges the reader to think beyond what they would do in a situation like this.

Little by little you learn more about these characters and what they are capable of. It's a true gift this book and I can't wait to share it with everyone I know!

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for allowing me the opportunity to read it!

Thank you so much to Random House for the eARC of The Dreamers! Out today!
I really enjoyed Karen Thompson Walker’s earlier book The Age of Miracles, so when I heard she had a new book I couldn’t wait to read it.
In The Dreamers, college kids in a small California town start to sleep and don’t wake up. As more people throughout the town are affected their families cope in a variety of ways.
I love books that look at something scientific in a unique way, and this mysterious sleep ailment sucked me right in. I also loved the writing itself, it seemed to fit the story perfectly!

I was instantly drawn into this story about a sleeping sickness that falls upon a college. Great descriptions that made me get to know the characters.

I was intrigued by the premise of the sleeping sickness but a little disappointed when the story dragged a bit in the middle and then the ending with the main ideas of the story came quickly and didn’t seem fully developed.

Overall an interesting story, but not sure that it’s my favorite. I received a copy of this from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

REVIEW - The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. When college students in Santa Lora, California suddenly slip into a sleep they can not awaken from, the town begins to to panic. Slowly more and more people are hit with the sleep and the amount of dreamers grows to nearly the entire town. As the danger and mystery surrounding this illness spreads, few people are left to help and survive.

Totally unique book. A bit sci-fi, a bit dystopian and a bit mystery. I just wished there was more character development. There’s a whole cast of characters and some we know more about as they become dreamers and some I really didn't develop much of a connection. I liked it and would definitely recommend it. I don’t know if I overhyping it but I was a little underwhelmed. Side note - I love the cover and hate how my paperwhite is not in color.

But I could use this sickness for a week and maybe I’d come home to a clean house well rested and 10 years younger.

Thank you to @netgalley and @randomhouse for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. This book is available TODAY, January 15th 2019!

So much of this life will remain beyond our understanding.

Karen Walker has written a fascinating, mildly sci-fi story of a small California town hit by previously unknown virus. Those infected fall asleep for weeks, maybe months, and some don't survive at all. The dreams that are reported by the survivors bring to light the fact that sometimes it's hard to distinguish between reality and dream.

I loved this story and would recommend it to readers who enjoy the works of Michael Crichton. I was surprised that I became emotional in reading how the characters interacted with each other through the course of the quarantine. I was not completely satisfied with the ending, but I think Walker was able to convey her message by the time the story ended.

"At first, they blame the air.

It's an old idea, a poison in the ether, a danger carried in by the wind. A strange haze is seen drifting through town on that first night, the night the trouble begins. It arrives like weather, or like smoke, some say later, but no one can locate any fire. Some blame the drought, which has been bleeding away the lake for years, and browning the air with dust."

The Dreamers is a stunning third person narrative that takes place near Los Angeles, in a fictional town called Santa Lora, California. Mei's roommate, Kara, falls asleep, then over a few days her breath and heart rate slow, until she dies. After a few students fall into the deep sleep, their dorm is put under quarantine. The illness slips through the cracks and spreads throughout the town. As hundreds of people fall asleep and began to dream, we meet many people affected by the mysterious illness, who are trying their best not to infect the ones they love.

"This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love."

I was hooked after the first paragraph. The characters are extremely well-written. They feel like people I could know in real life. The connection to characters, pacing, mystery, description, and writing style work together to create a fantastic work of fiction.

The ending felt abrupt, and left me with unanswered questions.

The Dreamers is a memorable and entertaining read that I recommend to readers who enjoy character-driven, thought-provoking Sci-Fi novels with an open ending.

Setting: 3/5

Plot: 4/5

Characters: 4/5

Writing: 4.5/5

Message: 4/5

Overall: 3.9

Thank you to Netgalley and publisher for the complimentary copy in exchange for my honest review.

*Quotes taken from an ARC copy and subject to change*

Disclaimer: I received this book from Netgally for review purposes.

Honestly, I know this was one of the first books I've read of the new year - but I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of the best I'll read all year.

I LOVED this. The story was intriguing, the writing was beautiful, and the characters came to life and felt real. Everything about this was so perfect to me.

I was a little worried about how the ending would be. I could see it kind of being unfinished or up in the air, which usually bothers me. About half way through i realized I liked the book so much, I wouldn't have even cared. (Happy to report that it does end and wrap things up)

I don't remember being that taken with her last book, but based off of this I kind of want to read it again.

High recommend.

❝What if misfortune can be drawn to a place, like lightning to a rod?❞

Mysteriously magical prose with a haunting and captivating storyline.

An epidemic has swept its way into a college town causing several to slip into a deep sleep of heighten dreams. Records have never shown such brain activity before. Those affected by this sleepy sickness begin to be quarantined. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist is summoned to see if they can make sense of it all.

❝...this sleep: a twilight more than a night.❞

This was a brilliant conjunction of both the science fiction and dystopian genres. The writing in this book made me feel as if I was in a slumber much like the characters were. It was written in such a poetic and mystifying way. It was an unstoppable-dream-of-a-book impossible to put down.

I read this book in a day. It gripped me right from the beginning. I loved that the author followed several different characters' storylines as this strange sleeping sickness takes over a small Southern CA college town. I was hoping for a little more closure by the end but it was still an entertaining read. I definitely recommend putting this page turner on your list!

Review on The Quill to Live -

At least once a year, it feels like the news highlights an outbreak of some dangerous disease. Very often it’s contagious, with disastrous side effects and varying numbers of fatalities. I myself was quarantined to the University of Delaware campus during the outbreak of swine flu in 2009. The Center for Disease Control was brought in, and the school’s field house became a medical center. Luckily, I and the people I knew were unaffected beyond our inability to leave campus. But still, to look back and remember that bizarre episode as I write this feels surreal. Karen Thompson Walker manages to capture that same feeling in The Dreamers. Through a methodical narrative, Walker details the slow spread of the disease, the inability of the authorities to explain it, and their eventual quarantine of a small American town in the northwest.

The Dreamers starts with college kids coming back drunk from a night of partying. None are the wiser as one of the young women sleeps through the morning. As the day wears on, she does not answer texts. As they come to her room in order to rally her for another night of partying, they find they cannot wake her up. She is taken away by the hospital, and the other students console each other. Over the next several days the students learn that she died in her sleep. Slowly, other students in the dorm succumb to the same condition. The campus isolates the dormitory, effectively sealing the students in. As time passes, more students across the campus and later the town fall ill with the sleeping sickness. No one knows what to do, and the only treatment seems to be life support until they can wake – if they ever do.

The book follows several sets of people affected by the disease in different parts of Santa Lora, all at different stages in their life. Often Walker pairs her characters off, with one suffering from the disease and the other dealing with the repercussions. Unfortunately, despite this interesting take on storytelling I never felt particularly investing in any of the characters.. I got the two male protagonists confused, and I only felt attached to two individuals because they were among the first characters introduced. It’s not that our cast was uninteresting, but that I saw them as just the vehicle to the tell the story. It helped that Walker highlighted that the disease affected people of different social standings, showcasing their different reactions and their ability to survive the outbreak and subsequent quarantine. My favorite dynamic was between Mei and her dorm-mate Matthew. Their budding intimate relationship was shown in counterpoint to their very starkly contrasting outlooks. Mei and Matthew felt the most fleshed-out as characters, due to their muted and often touch and go young romance along with their relentlessly emotional discussions about what they can do as the world falls apart around them.

For me, the selling point of The Dreamers is the procedural style that Walker forces the reader to sit through as this small town slowly becomes threatening to the rest of the country. The disease starts small with the college students and eventually breaks out into a nursing home. Doctors and medical researchers are brought in, and no explanation or cure can be found. Many of the victims do not wake up, regardless of drugs administered. Oddly, they are all experiencing high brain functions, suggesting they are all dreaming. Still, this explains nothing to the professionals. As more people fall asleep, the national guard is called into blockade the single road out of the mountain town. Walker is blunt about the response, often citing other periods in American history in which the government was brutal in its methods to prevent further contamination. It shows that Walker did her research when writing this book, as everything felt very realistic.

The surreal and foreboding tone of The Dreamers easily kept me invested until the final pages, as Walker’s writing read almost like a clinical report of the events. Often, entire chapters were just a statement of facts: “The disease appeared in [INSERT BUILDING HERE] building, infecting [X NUMBER OF] victims.” The number of beds being filled and slow attrition of medical personnel succumbing to the disease felt like a losing battle. It helped build an apprehension that I had a hard time shaking. Even the chapters that followed a character had a detached feeling to them. I do not know if this was Walker’s intention, but I often felt like I was supposed to be unattached, so I could understand the whole picture instead of focusing on a single character’s struggle to leave the town. It was paralyzing in a way I did not expect. On top of that, almost every ramp-up in the response to the disease was paired with a story of a true historical episode, heightening the realism and the dread that a cure may never be found.

Unfortunately, beyond the plodding descent into controlled chaos, the disease itself did not feel like it added anything to the narrative. I was mostly intrigued by the dreaming aspect when I first heard of the book, hoping it would play an important part in the progression of events. Unfortunately, the dreaming did not seem to play an important role in the narrative and it was a bit disappointing. After a week of thinking about it, I still could not find a connection that resonated with me, but it was something I gradually became okay with. Others may find something in the dreams that adds to their experience of the story, but unfortunately, I was left wanting. The disease was not the star so much as it was the instigator and catalyst to the greater story.

In the end, Walker’s focus on the community, the town, the society, and the people that comprise those institutions makes this book worthwhile. It is a story that has been told before, but the tone and the research backing up the narrative’s speculative events solidify the realism. I did not get as invested in the characters as I wanted to, and some of the undertones of the dilemma of individual versus community could have been clearer. However, Walker’s distanced approach to writing, as well as the slow buildup of unreleased tension make The Dreamers an experience I recommend.

Rating: The Dreamers – 6.5/10
-Alex

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker ‬
‪is a wonderfully eerie and speculative novel, it’s beautifully written and if you’re a fan of Station Eleven, this book is for you!