In a remote mountain town in California, students are enjoying their freshman year at the local college. A quiet, timid girl named Mei feels left out of a lot of the female bonding and social activity. Then, one day, Mei's roommate, Kara, doesn't wake up. At first Mei assumes she was just out drinking the night before and is sleeping in, but soon the whole dorm floor is alarmed when Kara continues to sleep, into the next day. Someone calls 911, and Kara is taken to the hospital. Soon, another student on their floor succumbs to this "sleeping sickness," and then another and another. Mei's entire floor is quarantined, and she and the other students watch from the windows as life goes on without them outside. Soon, though, the sickness (if that's what it is?) has spread to other students and other dorms and to professors and others who live in the town. Nathaniel is an older professor whose partner is in a nursing home in town with dementia. Annie and Ben are a young couple who have just moved to town for professor jobs at the school. Their infant daughter, Grace, is only a few weeks old, and they are dealing with the typical sleep-deprived challenges of new parenthood. Catherine is a psychologist who has come in from another town to help during the emergency, leaving her own daughter at home with her grandmother. Libby and Sara are two little girls who live with their father, who's a survivalist with a basement equipped for an apocalypse ... which might actually be happening now. A few people die, but most just keep on sleeping, and doctors can tell that they're dreaming, too. Who will succumb? Who will wake up? The town is fully quarantined, as people wonder and doctors try to figure out what this new illness is.
This book was published in 2019, before our own pandemic, so some scenes and reactions are particularly unsettling, but Walker has come up with a wholly unique, fictional epidemic with some intriguing questions associated with it. All people sleep and dream, but what if a whole town was stuck in that state? What if people had vivid, life-like dreams that lasted for months? Like in The Age of Miracles, Walker presents these kinds of thought-provoking scenarios. But her talent really lies in digging into how humanity responds to these puzzling phenomena. As the narrative moves from one character to another, we see a full range of reactions and emotions. The story is also suspenseful, as the reader wonders who will be hit next and who will wake up and when. It's a quiet story with a deep and provocative center. I was immersed in this world and gripped by this fascinating novel, so much so that I also read every word of the author interview at the back. I can't wait to see what Walker comes up with next!
299 pages, Random House
This book fits in the following 2022 Reading Challenges:
Mount TBR Challenge
Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.
Visit my YouTube Channel for more bookish fun!
Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/or download it from Audible. It sounds great!
You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!
Or you can order The Dreamers from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.
I have only read one pandemic book since Covid came to stay. This one seems intriguing.
ReplyDeleteThis wasn't technically a pandemic story - the "sickness" was limited to just this one little town in the mountains - they were able to completely quarantine it since there was only one road in and out. I like the way this author takes a big event like that and makes it intimate, zeroing in on how a few people react.
Delete