A review by mmajer
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

4.0

“But isn’t the future always an imaginary thing before it comes?”

The Dreamers is a novel about a town in California where, starting at a local college, people start mysteriously falling asleep with no explanation or cure. At times this book was a 5 star read for me. It was well written and sort of had an ethereal quality to it. Why it didn’t end up being a 5 star read was because the ending was very abrupt and I felt it left too many loose ends.

Spoiler

Also, from the book description and some mentions in the book, the people who develop this illness display unusual levels of brain activity, similar to schizophrenics. “They are dreaming heightened dreams- but of what?” It is right on the book blurb and is hardly touched upon at all. I kept waiting to read about it and get some insight into what was going on with the dreamers, but it sort of glossed over that towards the end. This focused mostly on the people who hadn’t yet caught the illness as opposed to the actual dreamers. Not that that was a bad thing, but I felt those few mentions were a tad misleading.

Overall I thought this was a very imaginative and engaging novel, and I really enjoyed it.