Review 3: The Dreamers

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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. Yet I have yet to find a good decent book that encapsulated 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 the virus soon does as well.

The book follows several different characters, an 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.


Thanks to Random House Publishing and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book.