#The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

[words-and-coffee]

The things that could have happened but did not are just as crucial to a life as all the things that do.

Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

[mariasbookishcorner]

(via The Dreamers: A Thought-Provoking Novel by Karen Thompson Walker - Book Review)

I recently finished reading "The Dreamers" by Karen Thompson Walker, and it’s one of those books that sticks with you. Walker creates a captivating and eerie story that blends everyday life with the fantastical, making it hard to put down. This book has garnered attention for its compelling premise and lyrical prose, drawing us into a world that is at once familiar and deeply strange.  Let’s dive into what makes this book so special!

[narc-issus]

THE DREAMERS BY KAREN THOMPSON WALKER: QUOTE

"His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid.... And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams."

[semper-legens]

123. The Dreamers, by Karen Thompson Walker

Owned?: No, library Page count: 299 My summary: In a small college town, students are starting to fall asleep, and not wake up. Soon the sleeping sickness has spread through town, and people are starting to realise something is wrong. From the two young children of a disaster prepper, to a young family with a small child, to the original girl’s roommate, to a professor whose husband is in a nursing home - everyone has their ways of coping with the mysterious illness, even as the doctors and psychologists cannot explain it. Then some of the sleepers start to wake... My rating: 4.5/5 My commentary:

This book is so interesting. I absolutely loved its lyrical, appropriately dreamlike prose, the strange and drifting approach it takes to its world and characters. While I don’t think everything in this book by necessity hits its mark, by God I appreciated the effort. The ensemble cast! The wide scope! The aura of unease and uncertainty that flows throughout every page! This is a haunting book, and I am really, really glad that I read it.

So this book was so obviously a response to the Covid-19 pandemic that it genuinely surprised me when I checked when it was published and found out it was in 2019. I can’t help but evaluate how this book presents the reaction both of the authorities and the public during a pandemic to, you know, our real experiences with living through that exact situation - but even knowing the author had no idea a massive pandemic would happen within a year of this book’s publication, it holds up pretty well under that lens. Even some of the specific details, like a nurse’s wedding becoming a superspreader event or people choosing between their own needs and keeping up quarantine procedures, doctors and nurses working around the clock with few resources while the authorities aren’t stepping in. It was both kind of eerie, and a very good reminder that the events of the pandemic were entirely predictable to anyone with an understanding of how these things spread.

What else can I talk about? I liked the ensemble cast, which flitted between a few key characters while also giving an overview of the whole town’s reaction to the sickness. It really gave a great sense of how everyone is acting within this situation while still maintaining the personal approach of having specific characters, which I really liked.

I’ve mentioned the lyrical prose above - the downside to it is that sometimes the barrier between reality and dream was blurred, which didn’t aid comprehension, though of course I appreciate that this was probably deliberate. The reference to not everything hitting its mark was this; later, it is established that those who slept experienced time in a strange way, having premonitions of what was to come as well as living for years inside their dreams, with the second victim of the sickness living an entire parallel life in her dreams in the space of a few weeks. This idea wasn’t really utilised to its best, it was introduced too late to really be fleshed out, but overall I think it worked. And certainly, it didn’t dampen my enjoyment of this lovely book.

Next up, back into Horrible Horrible Things, as a young woman escapes a cult.

[book-warehouse-broadway]

A new stack of staff picks!

[littlepiecesofme7]

[freshlybrewedbookreviews]

His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail.

Karen Thompson Walker (The Dreamers)

[lookatbradsjunk]

[4.25/5 ⭐]

It's hard for me to say right now whether I liked this book because it was very well-written, or because we are currently living through a pandemic, and having been released in January of 2019, this book seems bizarrely prescient. This is the story of a sleeping sickness spreading through the college town of Santa Lora, CA: people are just falling asleep and not waking up. The sickness spreads so rapidly that the U.S. government declares cordon sanitaire (a term I learned specifically from reading this book), trapping everyone in Santa Lora inside the town, as the disease spreads and supplies dwindle. We get the story from a multitude of different perspectives, so here's a rundown of the core cast: Mei: Lonely college freshman, having trouble making friends in her new environment. Her roommate is the first person to contract the sickness, leading the the quarantine of their dorm. Later, when things in town start to unravel, she and her classmate "Weird Matthew" (who turns out to be just... an absolutely appalling person) take it upon themselves to go around town searching for people who have fallen asleep unnoticed and getting them to medical facilities. Sara: Awkward tween, trying to deal with her doomsday prepper father, while still navigating the pitfalls of adolescence. When her dad catches the sickness, she and her sister Libby (only ten months younger than herself) are left to fend for themselves, all alone, during a plague, a military occupation, and a relative meltdown of societal norms. Ben: (and to some extent is wife Annie? Although, really we spend considerably more time in Ben's head, especially as the story progresses). Ben and Annie are adjunct professors, new to Santa Lora. They have a newborn baby, Grace, and their marriage has seen some trouble by the time things start getting weird. Nathaniel: Biology professor at the college who is seeing to the care of his longtime partner, Henry who seems to have an unnamed form of dementia even before the sickness is even an issue. Catherine: Neuropsychiatrist and single mother from Los Angeles, called in to Santa Lora to investigate the sickness, only to get trapped there when the cordon sanitaire goes into effect. While I love a story told through multiple perspectives, I will say that Walker does a better job of making us care about some of these characters than others. Catherine's arc, in particular, is basically pointless: practically nothing happens to her, she comes out unscathed, and encounters very little conflict throughout. Nathaniel, likewise, has a very thin storyline, but I will say there is at least a little emotional payoff to it in the end. On the other hand, Mei's arc has lots of action and emotional impact: she escapes from quarantine with her classmates during a brush fire, falls in love with a relative sociopath named Matthew (I just cannot stress how much I hate him as a character: he's the kind of guy who spouts off about philosophy in casual conversation, plays an acoustic guitar, unbidden, at a social function, and is constantly interrogating his peers about what they would do during hypothetical moral quandaries). Sara also has a really engaging arc. I would argue she's kind of the "main character", if the story has one: we seem to spend a lot of time with her compared to some of the other characters, and she's our only POV character who remains awake for the entirety of the story (besides Catherine, who, of course, is inconsequential). Because her sister Libby is only 10 months younger than her, they have a great dynamic together that is fun to read. And because she has no mom and her dad is kind of... "erratic", let's say... you really come to empathize with her situation. Ben and Annie's arc is perfectly fine. They're learning how to be parents just as the sickness begins to spread. Having a newborn during a plague definitely makes for some believable stakes that you care about. Annie succumbs to the sickness pretty easily, but it's a slower process for Ben, and through his lens we get a fascinating look at what the virus does to a person's brain. I think I might have cared about this arc a little more if I was a married, heteronormative type with kids, but it was still pretty good. There's a lot going on here that I like--multiple perspectives, magic realism, a societal breakdown--so I probably would have enjoyed this book anyway, but the fact that it's about an airborne virus, quickly spreading through a community, and it was released only a year before coronavirus hit makes me appreciate it all the more for its timeliness. That being said, having now lived through a quarantine, a government shutdown of non-essential businesses, and protests that arise in these situations, I feel like Walker played everything a bit too safe. In this universe, the cops are pushovers, the national guard is just a bunch of nervous kids, and only one person gets shot (and spoiler alert: he lives)... to say nothing of the lack of tear gas in this book. Likewise, looting is pretty minimal and polite within the confines of this story and everyone treats each other very amicably. Aside from the sleeping sickness itself, there's very little conflict in this story--which is okay because Karen Thompson Walker is a gifted writer who makes you care about the story she's weaving, it just doesn't ring very true to life.

[the-librarian-geek]

I love this book! So thrilling 😍✌️

[astrangerhere]

astrangerhere’s top 10 books read in 2019 - #6

The Dreamers: A Novel by Karen Thompson Walker

“They died, he wrote, as if overcome by sleep - or, according to a second translation: as if drowned in a dream.”

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

[words-and-coffee]

Not everything that happens in a life can be digested. Some events stay forever whole. Some images never leave the mind.

Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

[bookaddict24-7]

The Dreamers by @karenthompsonwalker is my first book purchase of 2019! I’m going to try and be a little more frugal this year with my book buying (especially since I’ve just donated so many books), but this one sounded too good to pass up! Plus that cover! Wow! 😍📚

[bookcatbabe]

“Not everything that happens in a life can be digested. Some events stay forever whole. Some images leave the mind.”

-The Dreamers, Karen Thompson Walker

[enchantedtoreadwithyou]

An excerpt from The Dreamers that I really, really loved.

[book-warehouse-broadway]

Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you're all celebrating safely and enjoying the day off! Here are some of the things we're thankful for this year (but you, our customers, top the list, of course).

[bibliophilecats]

Recently read: The dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

I was really looking forward to a new book by Karen Thompson Walker, as I already enjoyed her first book, The age of miracles. And I was was not disappointed.

Who doesn’t know those dreams that seem more real than reality, that will stick wwith you for days.

In "The Dreamers", the reader follows the lives of several people in a city where a new, aggressive virus gradually lets almost all people fall into a deep sleep. The people come from different age groups, social backgrounds and situations. You also get a little view of how the society deals with the situation but the focus is always on the individual experiences.

The writing style is unusual (at least in comparison to what I mostly read) and certainly not for everyone: the omniscient narrator is very distant and yet there is enough of a bond with the characters that you want to know what happens to them. The mood is intense and a little scary, sometimes desperairing. And yet, the author manages that at the end you are not totally depressed but that there is a spark of hope.

One spoiler I would like to tell you, because it is important to me: none of the pets comes to harm. 

(Thank you to HarperCollins for providing me with an ARC)

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