2.5 stars. This was basically a quick, easy read of a so-so book. The story seems to move rather slowly and has a sort of dreamlike quality. An unknown virus spreads rapidly through a small town causing people to fall into a dream-filled sleep that they can’t be awakened from. Starts out very promising and intriguing but nothing much exciting happens along the way to the end, which just ends with no real explanation of it all. I was excited by the beginning of the book but pretty much ended up disappointed in it overall.

Review of The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

The book starts out with a young college student coming home from a party complaining of feeling ill. She goes to sleep and doesn't wake up. This "sleeping sickness" quickly spreads to other kids at the college and then to many people throughout the town. Many disasters befall the town because so many people get sick that there aren't enough citizens to keep the town functioning. The book primarily follows:

Mei- roommate of patient zero
Matthew- another college student
Rebecca- another college student
Ben and Annie- a married couple who have a newborn baby
Libby, Sara, and their father who is a doomsday prepper and conspiracy theorist
Nathaniel- a biology professor whose lover is in a care home due to dementia
Catherine- a psychiatrist who evaluates the sickness from a psychological perspective

I felt like there were way too many characters. This lack of focus made it hard to care if they developed the sickness or died. Initially the story was very exciting and felt post-apocalyptic but around the halfway mark it started to drag. It focused a lot on people's dreams. Some were interesting and/or relevant to the story, but most were boring and felt unnecessary. The ending felt abrupt and tied things up a bit too neatly to feel realistic. I gave the story 3 stars for initially grabbing my interest but by the end, I was dreading picking it back up.


This book comes out January 15th, 2019.
Thanks to Netgalley and Random House Publishing for providing me with an ARC.

This novel is about an unknown sleeping sickness/virus that takes over a small college town in California. It was fascinating, haunting and had me questioning the whole time. The prose is so lyrically beautiful, it almost reads like a dream itself. It was very different than any apocalyptic novel I have read before and really stuck with me. I really like how the story was told from the perspective of many different characters. It helped you feel like you were immersed within the town. I even managed to have some weird dreams after reading it and I am not normally much of a dreamer!

I received an ARC from Netgalley and Random House in exchange for an honest review.

I loved the dream-like quality of the writing, but I guess I thought it would "go somewhere". An enjoyable read, but an unfulfilling ending.

3.5 stars--somewhere between "liked" and "really liked."

This is literary fiction that reads like horror. The concept behind this book--a virus that causes people to sleep and dream for days, or weeks, or months--is terrifying. What if you're driving a car when you succumb? What if no one finds you and you die, starve to death while asleep? What happens to your children, your pets, your life, while you're sleeping away, hooked up to feeding tubes? The writing in this book is lovely, and I immediately cared deeply about the characters. I couldn't stop reading, and blazed through this book--it's short and very easy to read.

But this book also distressed me. Since I did care, reading about the suffering of the sleepers and their families was occasionally difficult. This is a lyrically written book, but I didn't necessarily enjoy it since I found it depressing--especially the sections about child characters.

I received this review copy from the publisher on NetGalley. Thanks for the opportunity to read and review; I appreciate it!

I really enjoyed this book....people start falling asleep and no one knows why. I liked how the different characters developed throughout the book. It make one wonder how it would be to have this falling asleep occur in people's everyday life.

I received an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I requested this book because I enjoyed the author’s first book, The Age of Miracles. Also, the publisher is comparing this book to Station Eleven, one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years.

Unfortunately, this book did not work for me. Unlike The Age of Miracles, in which we are focused primarily on one character, The Dreamers bounces back and forth between about seven different characters. Other than Mei, I had a difficult time connecting with any of them. More importantly, I’m unsure what the point of the book was. I got the sense an argument was being made—about connections between people, about dreams themselves—but it was lost on me. There’s some nice writing within (“She seems to be speaking carefully now, each word a fragile object, pulled from a high shelf”), but ultimately there was not enough of a story to hold my attention.

Wow, was this a great book. When I saw this book being recommended to fans of “Station Eleven” and “Never Let Me Go” I knew I had to read it. It honestly exceeded my expectations and is a book I thought about for days after I read it. My fear when reading a book like this is that the idea is going to be better than the execution and the payoff. Luckily, Thompson Walker was able to take an amazingly interesting concept and write a beautiful, thought-provoking novel about what could happen to society when the unexplainable occurs.

Any review of “The Dreamers” has to be careful to not reveal too much. This book is full of twists and turns and multiple characters that are all somehow connected and I don’t want to give too much away. Much of the pleasure I got from reading this book came from not knowing what was going to happen next and constantly being afraid and excited to turn the page. The basic story is this: in a college town in California, a student goes to sleep one night and doesn’t wake up. She is not dead, but is instead in a dream-like state. Then, another student succumbs to the same sleep. All too quickly, there are numerous cases, a quarantine is setup and the National Guard is called. Medical doctors, psychiatrists, specialists--- are all called in to help but no one can figure out what is causing the illness, nor any potential cures. There are several main characters: the roommate of the first patient, a janitor who works at the college and his two young daughters, a married couple of professors and their newborn baby, a psychiatrist, and an older professor at the college. Through their eyes, the reader is exposed to the fears and horrors going on in town and how the unknown can quickly change an entire town.

From page one, I was hooked. Even when I didn’t know what was going on, I was engrossed in the story. At one point, when I had no idea where the story was heading, I actually stopped and wrote in my notes “is this book about the end of the world?” There is definitely an apocalyptic feel to the story and the ending was exactly what I thought it was going to be and at the same time nothing like I thought it would be. There were some tough emotional moments that I refer to as “gut-punches” when I had to stop reading for a few minutes to reflect on what I just read. I found myself invested in the characters and genuinely cared about what happened to them and thought the choice of the characters to tell the story was great. Every character had a different thing to care about, whether it was their child, their family, or the neighborhood in general. The writing style was easy yet beautiful and I definitely highlighted some line I found to be particularly great.

I would HIGHLY recommend this book and think it would be a great book club pick. There are so many things to discuss and dissect and the writing was beautiful.

I somehow overlooked adding this book to GoodReads when I read it a few months ago, so my read dates may be off. That was a terrible oversight on my part, as this book is fabulous! Thompson Walker has a knack for filtering extraordinary events through the lens of the mundane. In this case, we watch as a town succumbs to a sleeping sickness wherein hundreds of people fall asleep for months, and in some cases years, while those around them try to go on with life and cope with the strangeness. Like her previous book, The Age of Miracles, The Dreamers looks at how life goes on even as the world around us ceases to make sense. It is apocalyptic without being apocalyptic.

Stunning piece of literature. A slow burn study of a quick moving virus. The author was brilliant in the way she spread the story out between multiple characters. There was a diversification in philosophy and understanding because the ages of the characters were balanced across many generations. This was easily one of my best books this year.

Out January 15th!

Ok folks. Here is your first great read of 2019 so add it to your lists and hold onto your hats!

If you are at all interested in stories about pandemics/outbreaks/diseases taking over the planet, this book will be your new best friend. I have always had an interest in books, movies, and TV shows about pandemics. Think Contagion, The Walking Dead, The Crazies, World War Z. Ok... they don't always have to be about zombies. But the idea that there is a patient zero and this sickness spreads like wildfire throughout a community has always amazed me. Because it could happen (and already has.... can you say Ebola? Zika? The list goes on). And the strategies we would have to take to contain the spread are also fascinating. I digress.

The Dreamers is a unique pandemic story that tells the tale of a sleep-inducing sickness that spreads throughout a small town in California. It starts quietly in a college dorm and slowly spreads throughout the whole town. The townspeople who are affected fall into an unwakeable sleep. Those who are lucky enough to be discovered will be tended to in the increasingly overcrowded hospital. Those who succumb to the sickness alone will die of dehydration. Nobody knows the cause of this sudden outbreak, but soon the residents of Santa Lora will find themselves in "quarantine," forbidden from leaving the infected town.

The story follows several different townspeople as they try to weather the storm, fend to stay alive, and plan their next move. Their stories weave together beautifully.

My heart was thumping throughout this entire book. I couldn't put it down. I finished it in less than 24 hours because I just could not wait to see what happened next. There was the perfect amount of tension, expertly crafted by Karen Thompson Walker. Several of the individual stories paused at just the right cliffhanger to leave me wanting more.

The ending was quite beautiful, and I loved the philosophical messages it sent. I have a feeling the end will not be everybody's cup of tea just because it is not black and white and doesn't give concrete answers to some of the questions presented throughout the book. But I think that's the beautiful part. Just enough was left up to interpretation, and every reader will take home a different message.

This book would be a really great read for anybody who enjoyed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. It comes highly recommended from me with five big stars.

-I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Karen Thompson Walker, and Random House Publishing for the opportunity to review.-

A mysterious sickness descends on a small California town. Dystopian fiction is outside of my usual reading, but I remember The Age of Miracles. The story can feel detached, maybe dreamlike (?) as it unfolds, but I found it compelling and fascinating as the characters try cope and make some sense of this odd sickness as it spreads. Thank you for this advance copy.

I was so excited to receive a copy from Randomhouse and netgalley. I read her first novel and didn’t hesitate to pick up this new book as soon as I could.

When a collage student falls into a deep sleep and no one can wake her, no one immediately panics. But more and more fall into the same sleep full of dreams. The small town of Santa Lora has no idea what’s coming.

This novel reminds me so much of Blindness by Jose Saramago. In a good way. But The Dreamer was set in much friendlier world and the response to the illness was more efficient and what you would hope would happen if something like that was to happen in your town.

Sometimes it did come across a little bit YA which I didn’t realize when I picked it up but thankfully I didn’t roll my eyes once ! Sometimes teens are so naive and predictable 🙂
I devoured this book is only 2 days, I was so invested in a few of the characters and their stories. I just had to know what happened next!

Insta/goodreads @heatherrradsbeaucoup
Review posted dec 1st. With recap on publication day : )

The Dreamers – Karen Thompson Walker

I received this advance reader copy of the book from Netgalley, in exchange for an objective review.

Mei is a freshman, who is still settling in to college life at the school nestled in the small California town of Santa Lora. Introverted, Mei is dismayed at the friendships that have formed without her and doesn’t have much of a relationship with her roommate Kara. That is why, when Kara falls ill, Mei thinks nothing of her sleeping in – not until she arrives back at the dorm to find Kara still asleep, and unarousable. Thus begins the ‘sleeping sickness’ as it becomes known to outsiders.
A few days later, the sleeping sickness takes another victim, and another. Soon the kids find themselves quarantined in their dorm, while the other kids are whisked away, out of Santa Lora. Meanwhile, the number of victims multiplies, and the CDC becomes actively involved. Remaining unarousable, the victim’s arrear to be dreaming… The town becomes isolated with military personnel manning the borders while physicians search for the cause and the cure.

As the afflicted increase in numbers and the rest of the world watches the news in fear, one of the victims awakens, talking of dreams he had that a fire would release the rest of the victims from sleep. Some remember dreams of things past, while others of things presumed to be future, and others no dreams at all. Others still have experiences that makes them question all that they are…

While this book was not quite what I expected, I loved it, and it is a story that resonates long after the final page is turned. Full of rich writing, and philosophical questions, it makes one wonder about the fine line between dreams and reality…

Beautiful prose, vivid and gripping story line. You feel transported into the chaos, the writing so urgent the worry and concern of the characters becomes your own as well..

I think this was the perfect book for a very specific reader...but I'm not that kind of reader. I picked it up because of its comparisons to Station Eleven, but I thought this book fell a little flat. It didn't have the same richness of plot or the same speed (I honestly thought it moved way too slowly). But, all that being said, I think that's mostly about my tastes as a reader who normally doesn't do a lot of sci-fi or dystopia. I do think this would be a great recommendation for people who are more into those genres.

In the quiet, college town of Santa Lora, in southern California, one college student falls asleep but won’t wake up. Soon, others begin not waking up. Doctors are stumped as to what is wrong but they do know the people affected are dreaming. But what the dreams hold, no one knows. Told in multiple perspectives; it focuses on how different people are affected by the results of this illness.

I have mixed emotions about this book. At first it was just ok to me (I felt that it was slow) but the longer I’ve let the book process in my mind, the more I like it. If you liked Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, then you’ll like The Dreamers.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House, and Karen Thompson Walker for an ARC in exchange for an honest review

I absolutely devoured this book! I couldn't put it down -- it was ethereal. I loved the various character POVs and the suspense of who would be next. Longer review to come closer to pub date.

In a small college town in Southern California, people begin falling asleep and not waking. As more and more people fall victim to the virus, the town is quarantined. The book follows a number of people as those around them fall asleep.

This book was extremely detached. None of the characters seemed real. Their emotions seemed muted and dulled. All of this made the book hard to read and boring. Unfortunately, this one was a bust.

First, let me say thank you to Random House and NetGalley, who sent me this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker is a dystopian fiction set in a college town of California. One by one, numbers of college students fall into deep sleeps. Soon, the illness spreads, creating a panic throughout the town and the country.

I am usually not a fan of dystopian fiction, whether present or future, but The Dreamers is for all. This is a dystopian/sci-fi for general fiction lovers, which is why I predict it will be flying off the shelves in January.
"The Dreamers" switches narratives between sets of characters: Mei & Matthew, college students on the same floor as the initial outbreak; Sara, Libby, and their father, who have prepared their whole lives for an apocalypse; Ben, Annie, and their newborn baby, just relocated to town from New York City, a move, it seems, to escape their relationship problems; Nathaniel, a biology professor at the college; Catherine, a psychiatrist that makes visiting calls to the town's hospital. Thompson Walker doesn't dwell on introducing these characters, she keeps it simple and yet -- maybe due to the circumstances she has laid out so realistically for us -- I adore them. I feel for them. I cheer them on.
As the novel (and the virus) slowly builds, the characters become increasingly intertwined. Case by case, people in the town fall to the illness, and unveiled is another layer: those affected have high brain activity, and are clearly in deep dreams. The theme of "dreams," discussed by each character, could have been one that drowned out the plot...but it doesn't. Careful is Thompson Walker's hand as she weaves these dreams and the philosophical translations into this story. While some of the writing is slow and formal (hardly any contractions to be seen outside of dialogue), it's in the most shocking scenes where her style of writing proves its worth. Towards the beginning of the book, we learn there are not universal symptoms to the stages of the illness. Thompson Walker's matter-of-fact tone is the only way I can feel the gravity of these scenes in so few words. It goes to show a great fiction writer doesn't need flowery language if their tone is well established.

At certain points in this story, I thought I may not get to see a real ending. But just before the final pages, it appears. That being said, the ending is not rushed or squished in the final few chapters. In such a complicated situation, somehow, the ending is simple and has been there all along....causing the detective in me to wonder why I didn't see it from the very beginning.

It leaves us with one question: Where does a dream end, and reality begin?