The Dreamers of Santa Lora is so worth reading. The stories of Ben and Annie, Sara and Libby, Nathaniel and Henry, Rebecca and the college students are so compelling. I could hardly wait to read it everyday and see what happened to all of my favorite characters. The differentiation between dreams and real life is not always easy or readily explained. As Ms. Walker says in her book "life will be obscure as the landscapes of someone else's dreams". thank you for allowing me to read this fascinating book.

This book is beautifully executed! The writing is superb, the characters are engaging and the point of view changes are lovely.

From an high school educator perspective, it's a little beyond the underclassmen. I could be appropriate for advanced courses, especially for engaging in analysis of perspective.

This was a great book! I enjoyed the writing, especially seeing characters from other people's point of views. The aspect of dreams, reality and fantasy was very original. I loved it!

Mysterious illness? Check. Fantastic writing? Check. Original storyline? Check. Satisfying ending? Check. This one kept me captivated from beginning to end. Thought provoking and a great overall read!

The Dreamers makes you wonder about the very things that govern our being....the brain, the fear of illnesses, and the power of sleep and dreams.

I really enjoyed this and found it very thought provoking and parts of it will haunt me. I’m reminded of the opening lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody: is this the real life, is this just fantasy.
When a sleeping sickness quickly spreads in a small college town in California, fear and helplessness kick into high gear. And then we watch, with eyes closed, as one by one, the young and old, become one with the dreamers. For me, the story was impacting because of the relationships that were formed, that existed, that survived. A novel of hope, love and how we live, why we live, who we live for.

What an incredible read!! Like a dream you don't want to end. Walker does a phenomenal job captivating the reader throughout the book. I didnt want to stop reading, but when I did it was a perfect ending.

I received an advanced digital copy of this book from Netgalley.com and the publisher Random House. Thanks to both for the opportunity to read and review.

Ms. Walker's newest novel, The Dreamers, is exceptional. A sleeping sickness has moved into a small town in California. Predictably, chaos breaks out, but what Ms. Walker does with the story is what makes it exceptional. The tale unfolds through numerous narratives, a college student, a professor, a young girl and her doomsdayer father, a young man with a newborn baby. Interspersed with these is the various theories, scientific, medical, philosophical different ideas on the sickness and more over on the human condition itself.

This is not a story of the triumph of the human spirit, though humanity does pull through in the end. It a a tale of the endurance run of an illness and it's aftermath. Nothing is the same.

5 out of 5 stars. Highly recommended.

I was sucked-in from page one. I was incredibly captivated by the writing style, following the stories of multiple people whose lives were uprooted because of this mysterious illness. I couldn’t put the book down! About 50-75% of the way through the book, I suddenly got bored. There was no development on the illness, it just kept spreading. I was expecting that…but, I was just ready for the big finale! What crazy twist was going to come about!? And you know what? It didn’t happen. I always keep my reviews spoiler-free, so I won’t share what exactly happens in the end, but it was a major letdown for me. This book had me so pumped about the most dramatic discovery that should’ve happened in the end but never did. I have swayed back and forth on my rating of this book…I really loved reading it, but I’m still just so upset at the ending.

3.75/5 Stars

I really enjoyed this book. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the synopsis, but if you aren't, it addresses a sleeping sickness virus that spreads within a town, starting in a college campus. It is often fatal and mysterious. ⁣
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This book follows many perspectives, almost so many it can be difficult to keep track of. However, it worked for me, as I was 100% invested in the journey. This book is haunting, beautiful, ethereal. The overall feel was similar to The Virgin Suicides and Station Eleven.

...Another winner for Karen Walker Thompson! I do love my sci-fi, but THE DREAMERS reads more like a nightmarish tale of horror. Thought I was reading Stephen King there for a bit.

The scariest things sometimes are not visible to the naked eye, but appear in our dreams.

Something has happened in the small isolated town of Santa Lora, population 12,106. "At first they blame it on the air." Some say it may have even been here before, a curse perhaps....decades ago. This time it begins at a college with a young girl who doesn't feel well, thinks she might have the flu and is so tired, she falls into a deep sleep.

More and more students are found sleeping, won't wake up. The sickness spreads to the town....along with fear and panic. A father's declaration seems to become reality, children are left to fend for themselves, and a young, weird idealistic college student who fancies asking what if death scenario questions of his fellow dorm dwellers makes a big decision....one that I guess shouldn't have surprised me....but did.

THE DREAMERS is an engrossing character driven novel about an airborne virus "unusually contagious like measles: you can catch measles if you walk through a room ten minutes after an infected person has coughed a single cough." Scary.....

But THE DREAMERS....what do they see in their sleep? What is real? What is imaginary?

***Wishes do come true! Arc provided by Random House Publishing Group - Random House in exchange for an honest review***

I’ve read a few very very very good books already this year, but so far The Dreamers was my favorite. I absolutely loved this hazy, atmospheric novel. I felt both removed but somehow intimately connected to the characters. Some characters were given much more space than others... to avoid spoilers, I’m thinking mostly of one specific character/story arc. These characters didn’t get much space in the book, but that space was so well used that they broke my heart several times in their few pages. If you like books with nice clean endings this is probably not the book for you, but I loved it anyways.

This ARC was provided in exchange for an honest review.

First, thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the Advance Readers Copy of THE DREAMERS. This is an amazing book, unlike anything I've read before. Tense and emotional, spare and deeply descriptive, thoughtful and thought-provoking. The feelings created by this book will stay with me for a long time, I think. I'd highly recommend this book, but be prepared to take some time to think as you're reading, to go on tangents, and to appreciate what you have had, have now and to wonder about the future.

I really enjoyed reading this but when it was all said and done, I'm not really sure there was much of a point to it. It was beautifully written and hard to put down, you read want to know what's going to happen and the characters are wonderful. I was just a bit underwhelmed when it was done.

I received a free e-galley from netgalley.com.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group for providing me with a copy of Karen Thompson Walker’s novel, The Dreamers, in exchange for an honest review.

In California, the small college town of Santa Lora has been struck with an unusual and highly infectious disease. Its citizens are falling into a deep sleep, lasting from weeks to over a year. No one knows why it is happening, how to cure it, or how to stop it from spreading. It afflicts all age groups and strikes so suddenly, that those whose bodies go undiscovered, quickly die of dehydration. Karen Thompson Walker’s novel follows several citizens of Santa Lora, who are desperate to keep from becoming infected, as they are stuck within the city limits during a mandatory town quarantine.

The Dreamers is a force of a novel. I could not put it down. I was most struck by the way in which Walker imagined this catastrophic situation, creating a range of scenarios and human emotions. For example, how would a new father trying to protect his newborn react when the two young girls from next door need his help? How would college students, sensing that their lives might soon end, interact when thrown together in an intimate situation? How do two children survive, when their father falls asleep? One character, a college student who is an early victim, takes ill shortly after becoming pregnant. She doesn’t even realize that she is pregnant, yet her baby grows while she is asleep. Even if she survives the disease, how will it affect her baby?

I loved The Dreamers, but I do have a criticism. The story is too short to contain all of the intriguing scenarios that Walker mentions. It’s as if she had too many great ideas and could not flesh them out in the space. For example, little attention is paid to a storyline in which a nursing home patient with memory loss temporarily regains his memory. This whole scenario could be an entire story. It’s fascinating and made even more compelling when we realize the result of this temporary memory issue. I don’t want to give any spoilers, as it is such a great twist with where this character and his spouse go next. Truly, it could have been the plot for another book and I wish that Walker had explored it more deeply. I felt the ending in general was rushed, when we learn about the dreams that the victims had been experiencing. It was so compelling and unexpected, that I wish Walker had expanded on her ideas.My disappointment all stems from wanting more.

The Dreamers is intense and unlike any book that I have read. Walker is an excellent storyteller. Her novel has quick pacing that kept me glued to the book. I read it in a single sitting. She has created characters and scenarios that will easily allow readers to empathize and imagine themselves in a similar situation. The Dreamers is a wonderful pick for book clubs and discussion groups, bringing up ideas of health, public safety, and morality. With the recent measles outbreak and debates over mandatory vaccinations, this is a timely novel.

The Dreamers is one of the best books that I’ve read in a long time and I can’t recommend it enough. I had not previously heard of Walker, but I can’t wait to read her first novel, The Age of Miracles and I look forward to her future works.

This is one of those ones where you finish it and just quietly reflect. Wow. The author delivered a fresh story that wasn't so out there as it couldn't be plausible. No, this was a dreamy novel-literally and figuratively. The language was downright hypnotic. That's what I will take away the most. The quiet intimacy of language at work here. It built a quiet suspense. This wasn't slow by any means. I didn't want to put it down as I wanted to know what would happen next. The author masterfully advanced the plot through the characters in a way I hadn't seen lately. It wasn't just endless shifting of perspectives to move the story along. The setting itself also worked as a character in the backdrop. I absolutely loved this novel. Thank you so much to the publisher for the ARC.

The Dreamers is one of the strangest science fiction novels I've read in decades, if it can even be called science fiction, and it's also one of the most beautifully written and oddly addictive novels I've read in years--so odd, in fact, that I was awake for hours trying to work out a way to review it. For the quality of the prose alone, it gets 4.5 stars from this reader, but as far as the plot and characters, it gets 4 stars overall.

There is something really strange going on in the remote southern California college town of Santa Lora, and it all starts when one of the students in the dorm, Kara, falls asleep and doesn't wake up, nor are any of her fellow students able to wake her, nor are the doctors at the hospital able to wake her from what they classify as a deep state of REM sleep. All they can do is keep her hydrated and fed via a feeding tube. Since it's the beginning of the school year, the other students, including her roommate, Mei, don't know each other well, and so their detached feelings about this odd occurrence aren't unusual, but soon other students on the 10th floor of that dorm are also affected by the same affliction--is it a plague? A virus? A mass hallucination? No one seems to know, and soon the students on other floors are evacuated, and the 10th floor is put on quarantine, and still students on that floor are falling into that dream state, as do people who've come into contact with anyone in the dorm. The dreamy prose adds a sense of unreality to the situation, and is reminiscent of novels like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, What Dreams May Come, Arrival, and Outbreak, among others, the multi-character narration is both strangely compelling and at the same time mysterious and dreamlike.

Whatever this dream-state contagion is, it spreads rapidly through the air, and soon the entire town is quarantined by the military, and the college--it's grounds and buildings all turned into a sick ward as more and more people, including those on the medical teams also fall prey to this illness. The many narrators, including Mei, an Asian student, who was the roommate of the first girl to be affected, teams up with Matthew, one of the oddest boys from the 10th floor, as they try to help, to protect themselves, and to understand what's happening. Two young female sisters, daughters of a survivalist father who falls ill, are also featured, as are Ben and Annie, new parents, and we follow Ben trying to care for his infant daughter when Annie soon succumbs to this sleeping sickness. One of the strangest cases is a growing fetus inside the womb of one of the female dreamers viewed with an unusual sense of detachment. All are experiencing something for which there seems to be no cure and no explanation, adding to the mystery, suspense, and the dreamlike quality of the experience, both for the characters and the reader.

The pace is rather slow-moving at the outset, allowing readers to get to know some of the many characters involved, and as more and more people succumb, the focus hones in on Mei and Matthew, and Matthew is a student of philosophy, bringing up such philosophers as disparate as Descartes, Freud and Jung, all in his attempt to make sense of it all. Are the dreamers real, or are those who've not succumbed merely characters in their dreams? What is the true nature of reality? Are we all living in our own dream state?

As a few of the dreamers eventually begin to awaken on their own, those who do seem to feel a disconnect with what others view as the present. Some report feeling as if they've seen the future, and continue to feel out of touch with the present. Others believe they've been sent to the past in their dreams, some believe that their dreams were prophetic, and some can't shake off the effects of their dreams, but if you're waiting for definitive answers to the many questions that arise in this novel, especially those about the nature of what we all experience as reality and the linear nature of time, the answers to these questions are ones you'll have to interpret for yourself. Prepare to do some heavy thinking, and encourage your friends and family members to read this novel, and I can assure you there will be many conversations about the nature of time and reality in your future. I was thoroughly entranced by the elegant prose in this addictive novel, and, if you too are drawn to questions and conversations about the nature of time and reality, I think you'll be equally entranced and equally addicted to this brilliantly written novel.

I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions expressed are my own.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for a copy of The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker.
3* I am not usually drawn to the Science Fiction genre but I do feel this novel falls somewhere in this relm.
In a small town a college girl falls asleep and doesn’t wake up. This sleeping epidemic keeps striking. Soon the town is quarantined from the outside world while scientists try to figure out cause and cure.
I felt somewhat disconnected from the characters. There were many to follow while no one in particular stood out for me. This novel held so much promise. It does highlight the best of humanity with some town people trying to help others, no matter the cost to themselves.

A special thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group—Random House for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A college freshman stumbles back to her dorm room and falls asleep. She sleeps all morning and into the next evening. Her roommate, Mei, tries to wake her without success; paramedics can't rouse her, nor the doctors at the hospital. Then another girl falls asleep, and then another.

The college is put on lockdown quarantining the students. Panic sets in as the once sleepy town descends into chaos. Those that are infected are experiencing a higher-than-normal level of brain activity and are intensely dreaming, but what are they dreaming about?

Thompson Walker uses third person perspective and divides the book into small, digestible chapters. This is not particularly effective, in fact there is a disconnect—it is as if the narrator is completely detached. Because of this format, the characters are not fully developed and I didn't feel an affinity towards any of them—I wanted to, especially Mei.

Written in luminous, hypnotic prose, The Dreamers is a beautiful, sweeping novel yet I was left feeling frustrated because nothing actually happens. That, coupled with the fact that there are several loose ends, left me thinking about this book long after I finished it. I'm rather perplexed to be honest, and not in a good thought-provoking way, but questioning what I just actually read.

Believe the hype! This one is amazing. For sure one of my favorite books in the last few months. I loved the ethereal, dream-like writing in this story about a small town put under quarantine when the students at the local college begin contracting an incurable sleeping virus. Told through the viewpoint of several characters personally affected by the virus, I loved the world-building and the authors exploration of dreams and how people react and behave under unusual circumstances. I’ve heard mixed reactions about the open-ended conclusion, but it didn’t bug me at all. I got #UnderTheDome vibes from this one (minus the horror), so if you’re a fan of that book or of dystopic fiction in general, definitely check this one out!