Review of The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

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.