It starts in a college dorm- a girl goes to sleep, but doesn’t wake up. Soon, others in the dorm follow her. Then it begins to spread throughout the town. First those affected are isolated and quarantined, but soon the government blocks off the whole town. The cause is obviously a virus, but how does it spread? How can it be stopped? Will the dreamers ever awaken?

This book has a good plot, but the problem for me came in the dreams had by those sleeping. They hinted at another dimension, or of prescience, but we never really found out. All in all, it was still a good read, and I would recommend it. Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC.

I loved this book, just as I loved The Age of Miracles and Station Eleven. The author's ability to world build and conjure characters is unparalleled. We will be recommending this title in our high school for grades 11 and up and I think it can have wide appeal!

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I loved, loved, loved The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. It centers around a town, Santa Lora, where a mysterious illness takes hold. It makes people fall asleep, unable to wake up. They appear to be dreaming, but it’s not clear whether they’ll ever wake up again. It centers on several different people during the outbreak and the aftermath, including a couple college students, a couple and their newborn, two young girls, and an older man.

It drew me in with the mystery, but I found myself less interested in the “why” of the virus and more in the “how” of survival. How could the characters prevent getting it? How do you treat them? This worked out well for me because the book wasn’t interested in the “why” either.

This book was so engaging and the writing was marvelous. I’ve never read Karen Thompson Walker’s work before, but I’m a big fan now.

4.5/5 stars

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a complimentary copy of The Dreamers. I really enjoyed this book and found myself thinking about it during the day when I wasn’t able to sit down with it. I don’t know what this says about me, but I kept forgetting that the disease/condition in the story was from a book and not real life. For example, a coworker complained of certain symptoms, and my gut response was, “Oh no! It’s spreading here!” The author did a great job of jumping to and from each characters’ stories, but not too much so, and enough time was spent on each for me to feel invested in them. This is the first book I’ve read by this author; I look forward to going back to read her debut novel and am eager to read her new releases in the future.

I was excited to get my hands on an advanced copy of "The Dreamers" by Karen Thompson Walker because of the comparisons to Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven". While both titles center around an outbreak of sickness, that's where the similarities end. I did enjoy "The Dreamers" and it kept my interest until the end but I'm not so sure this one will stay with me a long time like "Station Eleven" has. As I flew through the pages, I found myself more engrossed in the story itself rather than feeling much attachment to any of the particular characters which felt strange to be so detached about characters dealing with sickness, fear, and loss. I did find it to be an enjoyable well-told story just not life changing for me.

Thank you Netgalley and Random House for this advanced readers copy.

Hmm... it started off good, got slow, got weird, ended weird so how many stars to give? 3 would be about right.

The sleeping sickness starts at a college dorm and then spreads to the town, but it takes the longest time to figure out how it spreads and how to prevent it from spreading. The stories of the people affected are enough to get you involved in the desire to know what is going on, but then it got slow, descriptive pages that really didn't add anything to the story and tended to make me skim them.

For some, they awake with memories of strange dreams that may be the past or the present or just dreams; it's hard for them to tell which. At the end of reading it, I am left with wondering about a lot of things so as time passes, maybe I will have more answers, but right now? Not a book I'd rush to tell others about or urge them to read.

Thank you NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I couldn’t wait for Walker’s new book, since I loved The Age of Miracle so much, and The Dreamers was worth the wait.

With lyrical, beautiful prose Walker shows us a mysterious virus, which is silent, sudden and it leaves its mark even on those who survive it. Though we have more than one main character (an old professor who lost his love to Alzheimer, a young couple who tries to renew their shaky relationship and deal with their new born baby, a shy girl who falls in love with a wild and eccentric guy, a little girl whose father fears secret government conspiracies, a psychiatrist who is summoned to study the victims and a college girl from conservative religious family, who accidentally gets pregnant), so we don’t get that personal tone like in Age of Miracles, but I could still relate to all of their stories, because they had a common theme: love and loss.

As the virus and the panic spreads, the atmosphere gets more and more claustrophobic, and this meshed well with the multiple POVs, showing how the desperation and the fear of the unknown creeps into the life of the average family, how life narrows down only to surviving until the next moment in a time of disaster.
The bittersweet tone of the story also comes from that we not only see loss from grieving someone but a different one too: the victims of the virus have strange dreams, someone takes their own life due to this, someone is haunted by it for their whole life that they lost something. It’s not clear cut what the virus does to people, what the victims dream of, but it begs the question: what are memories? What makes them real? Is something any more real if it happened to us but we don’t remember it or if we remember something that didn’t happen (be it a false memory or these strange dreams)?

We might not get a real answer of what the virus really does, but it still makes the whole book depressing and mysterious, like a dream or a life not lived, a possibility we regret we didn’t take.

A quote from the book summarizes up the story very well: “a love for the end of the world.” It really felt like an apocalyptic love story, a love with Life itself.

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker was mesmerizing. This is the second of the author's books that I have read (the first being The Age of Miracles), and she has a gift for creating captivating stories around (literal) world-altering happenings. She writes the kind of stories that you keep reading because you want to know what happens next, but also, they make you wonder what you would personally do in the same situation. For this one, there is a mysterious illness that is impacting a college town in California. It starts in a residence hall. One student falls asleep and she doesn't wake up. She's still alive, but nothing can wake her from her slumber. Then, another person is impacted, then another, etcetera. With no clear answers, options for solutions emerge. This is where the ethical dilemmas begin. What do you do to help those who are impacted, while protecting those who aren't? The book follows a variety of residents of the town and students of the college to show how they react and how their various interactions with the illness are addresses. Y'all, this one was beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. Karen Thompson Walker draws you into the worlds she creates like no other author can. They bring you into the dilemma of the world she has created, while making you ask so many questions of your own life. She also does a really amazing job of showing the variety of options that are available, but never emphasizes one of these as the best way to handle. She really helps you see these are complex issues through the beautiful character stories she also builds. This was an advanced read I got thanks to NetGalley, and y'all are going to want/need to check this one out once it's released into the world in January.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for allowing me to read an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest opinion.

This book is about a sleeping sickness that takes over a remote college town and about the dreams the sleepers have. I found the book to be beautifully written with a 'dream-like' quality to it. The author shows a realistic response to a medical emergency and what happens if that emergency is initially low-key because people were 'just sleeping'. There is no magic solution or answer provided yet I didn't feel like I needed one when finished the book.

The idea that dreams can be historical in nature, predictions of the future, or alternate lives was an interesting way to look at things.

While reading I kept asking myself what I would have done in this situation: as a parent outside the quarantine line, as a school employee within the city, as one of the students exposed but not yet symptomatic. Thompson Walker's first book: Age of Miracles, kept drawing me back as well.

'His voice is rising to a shout, and the more he talks, the less the girls do, as if volume were like oxygen, a thing that runs out.'

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

'At first they blamed the air.'

I read Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles and it is one of my favorites. I was bummed (and shocked) to find it was a debut, so I've been eagerly anticipating a new book for a few years. The Dreamers absolutely was worth waiting for.

From the first page, I could tell that this would be a "draw-me-in" type read. Walker's writing is some of my favorite: giving facts in a beautiful way, and always giving little tidbits of future information that leave me wanting more. (and keep reading to find more) If I hadn't started this so late at night, it would have been a one sitting read because I just couldn't put it down.

I was worried with the number of characters that it would be either hard or uninteresting to follow all their stories. However, because each plot was so different and the characters were in such different situations, I had no trouble following all of them and found each one engaging for different reasons. That said, this is a story I wouldn't have minded being 100-200 pages longer so I could delve even more deeply into these characters and this world.

While this may be too light on science for avid sci-fi readers and too "action-light" for regular speculative readers, it was a wonderful for me. It is the type of book that makes someone like me, who doesn't often read sci fi/speculative fiction want to pick up more. One thing is for sure, Karen Thompson Walker is definitely a "must read" author for me for any future releases.

A virus hits the town of Santa Lora, California, which causes people to fall asleep. As the sleeping sickness spreads through the town, everyone is impacted by sickness and the resulting town-wide quarantine: Mei, a college student whose roommate Kara was the first to fall asleep and the first to die, professors Ben and Amy who are isolated with their new baby, Sarah and Libby, the young daughters of an apocalypse-predicting prepper, and more. The sleepers’ brains appear to be dreaming, and the character of life takes on a dreamy cadence as the world becomes stranger and stranger as the spread of the virus widens. The language in this story is lyrical and thought-provoking.

WOW what a book. Just finished reading an uncorrected proof (thanks NetGalley) and it was a 24 hour binge read for me. Such an engaging, intimate exploration of human nature, told through pandemic.

Aside from being lexically beautiful, this book really shines in its unique narrative structure. The author achieves the unusual, a book filled with multiple characters, each of whom you feel connected to. These characters are all so different, so beautifully formed, and I felt emotionally invested in its journey.

I loved the almost philosophical exploration of dreaming towards the end of the book, it poses a lot of big questions and is a real ‘thinker’.

It’s hard to review this without spoilers, but I will say this is one of my favourite reads of 2018. Beautifully written, emotional and engaging.

Dystopian/light science fiction, with an emphasis on its numerous central characters and their relationships and emotions. The central story of an epidemic is used to tie the characters loosely together, with occasional overlaps, and to investigate their back stories, with short chapters telescoping out to depict how the emerging crisis is viewed from outside - both by the characters' families who are not able to reach them, and by those experiencing the story through mass media. The novel is narrated in the present tense and third-person, with short sentences, slipping into past-tense when providing exposition on characters and occasionally using future-tense in order to describe action sequences; this movement is not heavy-handed, and is perhaps explained by the later chapters' ruminations on time, its arbitrariness, and its distortion in dreams. Great visual descriptions throughout, many good set pieces, and a satisfying conclusion. It seems destined to become a movie.

Wow—I whipped through this book, driven both by wanting to know the outcome of the “sleeping sickness” that infects residents of this small college town, and to know what will happen to the various protagonists whose stories are told in this novel.

I loved The Age of Miracles, which also dealt with the changes that are wrought in the lives of everyday people as a result of some uncontrollable natural occurrences. Just as in that novel, Karen Thompson Walker explores how certain rites of passage-having a baby, or falling in love for the first time-are impacted by this unexpected change in the normal functions of society. In addition, she also examines the impact these uncontrollable events have on those people who believe their decisions and actions will provide them with a strong ability to direct their own future.

I was especially left pondering, and moved by, the interplay between dreams and time for each of the dreamers. I almost feel like going back and rereading the story with the knowledge of how each of the characters dreams, to see if that gives me a greater insight into who they each were throughout the book.

I have gone back and forth throughout writing this review between giving it a rating of 4 or 5 stars. I am pretty stingy with my 5 star ratings, so I think I will leave it with four for now, but I wouldn’t be al, that surprised to find that I decide to raise it again at some point in the future. Regardless of my final star rating, I highly recommend this novel.

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker // 📘📘📘📘 // This book was a wonderful palette cleanser. It’s the cheese and fruit course after the heavy filet mignon I’ve been reading lately! A college student returns home from a party complaining that she doesn’t feel well and crawls into bed. The next morning, Mei, her shy, lonely roommate, cannot wake her. She is deep in sleep, alive but barely. Her brain is working overtime and it’s clear that she’s dreaming. When she doesn’t survive and another student is infected with the mysterious virus, and another, then another, Mei and the other students are put on lockdown. Gradually, the whole town becomes aware of the virus—there’s a professor whose partner is in a nursing home, a mother and father with a newborn baby; a survivalist father and his two daughters… They wonder how to protect themselves, whether they can leave town. But the virus seems to be airborne and gradually the entire town is quarantined. Rumors swirl and everyone wonders if this is some big conspiracy. Will they survive? Will the dreamers wake up? What, for heaven’s sake, were they dreaming about? 📘📘📘📘 4/5 books // This was a fantastic, entertaining thriller! The writing was beautiful and I loved the philosophical questions that the story brought up. The pace was quick and I really loved the short chapters and the interspersed stories. This would make an awesome movie! Grab the book when it comes out in January 2019!! #thedreamers #karenthompsonwalker #prereleasereview #advancereadercopy #arc #netgalley #thriller #psychologicalthriller #virus #collegetown #california #contemporaryfiction #2018reads #bookreview #alana_loves_books #alanalovestoread #booknerds #bookstagram @netgalley @randomhouse

The book was intriguing from start to finish. I found myself cheering for most of the characters, but some of them were just plain weird. The situation was too realistic for comfort. This is a great book but be careful, it’s hard to put down.

Karen Thompson Walker has another hit with The Dreamers. With each book her writing style continues to mature.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Honest, yes. But also biased. I read Karen Walker Thompson's Age of Miracles, and was impressed, so when I saw this on NetGalley, I knew I was going to want to read it.

Then I read the synopsis. Dreams and sleep? Two of my most intense obsessions for years now. I couldn't download it fast enough.

It did not disappoint. I feel that book hangover already, and it's been more minutes since I finished. My brain feels like it's shrinking, or fuzzy. The world around me seems not quite real, slightly off. This book was amazing.

In a small town in California, Santa Lora, a college girl falls asleep, drunk. Her roommate, still a stranger mostly, doesn't think anything of it when she leaves for class in the morning. She's just sleeping it off, right?

When Mei comes back that night, she realizes something is wrong. Her roommate is still asleep. The ambulance comes and takes her away. She's alive, but they cannot rouse her. What's more: she dreams. Her eyes are swiftly moving back and forth between her eyelids.

So starts the beginning of a new, unknown virus. Experts are flown in as more and more people succumb to the mysterious somnambulant illness.

Thompson's storytelling is flawless. She moves between characters effortlessly, and you feel for every one of them. It's a story of more than sleep and dreams, but also of societal breakdowns, the love and care people will find in themselves in the worst of times, life, love, loss, endings, beginnings.

I figured it would be a good book, but I wasn't expecting this. Thompson has raised the bar on herself. A fantastic second book. So very highly recommended.

If you like stories which answer all of your questions by the end and wrap everything up in a neat little bow, The Dreamers may not be for you. However, if dreamy, evocative prose and heartfelt relationships between characters are what make a novel worthwhile for you, I definitely recommend giving The Dreamers a chance.

The Dreamers alternates between the perspectives of multiple characters in the aftermath of the outbreak of a mysterious sleeping sickness. Sufferers fall into a REM-like sleep and cannot be awoken, but appear for all intents and purposes to be otherwise healthy. The science fiction aspect of the story remains in the background, while the reactions of people both on an individual level and as a group are the focus of the novel.

Facing rising panic in the community as the disease remains a total mystery and continues to spread, we get to know the young daughter of a doomsday prepper who never envisioned this particular possibility, the father of a newborn who is struggling with the danger to which is child is now exposed, the roommate of patient zero who feels guilty for not noticing and trying to help sooner, and a psychiatrist working to solve the mystery of the sleeping sickness. Pressure slowly mounts as a quarantine is put into place and each of these characters spends day after day in fear.

This rising tide of panic provides some of the most interesting passages in The Dreamers. The story is deeply psychological, pushing each character to their limits, often coming back to the same question: will you help when it becomes difficult, when it's scary, when it can come at great personal cost? What is your breaking point? What if you would put your loved ones at risk in addition to yourself? With the constant threat of spreading this mystery contagion, some characters will step up and some will run for cover. At each step of the way, we are called to sympathize with them for these choices, whether or not we agree with them.

As I said, The Dreamers may not be for you if you need all of your questions answered by the final page of the novel. Despite thoroughly enjoying the process of reading this, I felt at the end that there was a lack of resolution. I wanted more answers. I wanted closure and a concrete sense that those who remained were forever changed by the experience. This lack of resolution kept this from being a five star book for me, but Karen Thompson Walker's gorgeous prose and exploration of human emotions were well worth the time invested in this novel.

It is kind of ironic that a book called The Dreamers, felt like a dream to read . It was the perfect combination of my favorite kind of story mixed with beautiful, and perfect writing. It's funny to say that a book written about a virus is beautiful, but there is a way to write about something so tragic in a way that doesn't make the tragedy more important than the cast of characters. Karen Thompson Walker has perfected this art. I read a lot of stories in which a tragedy occurs, many times its a virus, or some other way the people in the novel are in danger of dying and losing loved ones. But books like The Dreamers truly make an impact because they are written in such a way that they build upon the story in a natural, flowing way. The Dreamers doesn't rely on storytelling that just starts with "this happened, then this happened, which caused this to happen, then they did this, then the end." It explores the inner thoughts of its characters and that is how we learn about the virus taking over the small town of Santa Lora, CA.
It begins in a college dorm where we meet Mei. An outcast among the other outgoing, typical, college freshmen exploring their new-found independence. One morning Mei's dorm-mate will not wake up. Oddly though, she is still breathing and her heart is still pumping, so she is rushed to the hospital. The kids in the dorm are understandably freaked out. They don't yet realize what they are in for until one by one more of them fall asleep. As more and more of them fall ill, their young minds struggle to grasp the idea that their lives are forever changed. News media floods the area, and it isn't long until the college dorm isn't the only place the virus is hitting. Soon, we meet Sara and Libby, two young girls whose father prepared for an event like this. Their basement is full of everything they could possibly need for any type of doomsday scenario. Their father works as a janitor at the college and returns home from work one night with the knowledge that all of his planning has been for this event. Nathaniel, a college professor at the college where the outbreak has begun, is caring for his dying husband who lives in a local nursing home. With all of his classes cancelled, he is taking a deeper look at his life and realizing that the time left with his husband may be cut even shorter. Next door to Sara and Libby live two professors who recently moved from New York with their newborn baby. Each time their baby falls asleep, they wait anxiously for her to wake up. Knowing how much newborn babies sleep, and facing an unknown virus which causes people to fall asleep and not wake up, I can only imagine the sheer terror these parents faced. Last, we follow a psychiatrist who is away from her young daughter while researching this sudden outbreak. Her job initially is to help determine if this virus is real, or possibly psychosomatic. While she is in Santa Lora, her medical duties multiply quickly as she sees her fellow doctors fall one by one, into this endless sleep.
For those of you who feel like this book is similar to Stephen King's novel Sleeping Beauties, the only commonality is the fact that the virus is a sleeping disease. SPOILER ALERT: In King's book; Only the women fall ill and are wrapped in cocoons, they go homicidal if you disturb them, there is a crazy magic witch and a huge tree in another world where the women now live. So, I would definitely say these two books are different. Both great though!
I loved this book. It restored my faith that more books can be written in my favorite genre that don't sound like every other book I've read. This is one of my favorite examples of a book that sounds too "out there" for people, yet people of all reading tastes will love it. Much like another favorite of mine, Station Eleven. Both of these books are the kinds that I get sad about when they end. I know that readers will devour this book, not matter what their favorite genre is, if given the chance. This book will be one of my favorites this year, and likely for years to come.