The Dreamers

The Worth having literature.

Goood

I didn't like the story. For me it was boring and possibly dragged too much.

The story or the mystery remains unsolved. The story is quite intriguing but the end is unsatisfactory. The characters which were main, in the sense the story revolved around them just disapeared. Story is good, but expected better ending.

"This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love." - Karen Thompson Walker🌼🌿🌼As , you would have guessed from the quote this is a book about a pandemic, something similar to what's happening right now. In a small town, people have started going to sleep and never waking up and when they sleep they dream, leaving the awake to pick up the pieces.🌼🌿🌼The premise is very intriguing and I loved all the characters (in honesty there were too many characters). As the disease progresses it becomes more unclear whats the main focus should be , whether it's how the remaining people will survive or what the patients are dreaming about. I would have loved to read more about the dreams as the name suggested.

This book has been sitting on my kindle since 2019 but I'm glad it's now that I'm picking this up, I think I had to live through covid and the world's reactions to fully appreciate this novel.It starts with one college kid that goes to sleep and doesn't wake up regardless of the people around them trying to wake them up, they continue dreaming.Then it starts to spread. The sickness.I really enjoyed The Age of Miracles by the same author and here she is again taking an everyday occurance and using it to create an after to our before.I do think the ending was rushed and I'm left with a few unanswered questions, but having lived through 2020, I have unanswered questions from then too so I understand why the author made certain choices.That aside this is a novel that raised my anxiety and the tension was real.Sweet dreams readers.Four stars.

Is this book contemporary fiction, literary fiction, or speculative fiction? I think it's a dream composed of all three. It pulled me in from the first page, and I hated having to put it down. In this book, a small college town in the mountains of southern California falls under the sway of a mysterious virus that locks its victims into sleep. Their sleeping minds show levels of activity previously unrecorded. Those who die are either left undiscovered and dehydrate or they go so far into sleep and relaxation that their hearts simply stop beating. What happens in the wake of such an illness? When dreams feel real, how do you come back to the waking world? Have some of the sleepers seen the future? Did any of them feel anything from the waking world while they were under? These are questions this story and these characters grapple with, and I found it riveting. If you're looking for everything to be tied up in a neat bow with no lingering questions, this isn't your story, but I felt the ending fit the story very well.Note: I, a U.S. customer, bought my copy from a third-party seller and ended up with the UK Edition hardcover, which I'm fine with, as the cover is prettier. Just know that if you do the same, you may not end up with the cover pictured in the listing. Some people, I'm told, care about the covers a great deal.

Item arrived as it should. Son used it for school.

Let's get the elephant in the room addressed first: yes, Karen Thompson Walker's novel The Dreamers is the tale of an epidemic, and I think it's going to be a long time before reading scenes of panicked grocery shopping, uncertain people looking out from behind masks, paranoia over how germs spread, and the like is ever going to be something that's without at least a twinge of trauma and unpleasant memories. But if you can set that aside, The Dreamers is a beautiful little tale, one that captures a lot of the magical and yet uncertain mood that anchored Thompson's breakout novel The Age of Miracles, albeit doing so without quite the thematic tightness of that novel. The Dreamers unfolds in a small California college town, where a sleeping epidemic has started - that is, people have started to fall asleep, but don't seem to be able to wake up. Into this scenario, Walker gives us a wide cast of characters - a shy college freshman who doesn't know anyone; a strong-willed moral absolutist; a pair of new parents terrified of what all this means for their newborn; two sisters raised under the control of a prepper father; a gestating child - and uses the uncertainty and unease of the moment to explore all sorts of ideas about how we connect to the people around us, how morality can lead us to have to confront our own ideals in the face of reality, how the future and the past can shape our present, and the roles of dreams in all of this. It's all wonderfully told, and the mood of the whole thing is magical - it's undeniably a book that reminds me of how powerful it was as Thompson used that same mix of promise and fear as a metaphor for growing up in Miracles. The thing is, The Dreamers doesn't feel as tight or cohesive as that book did; it's impeccably crafted and wonderfully immerses you in its characters and its story, but it never feels like it quite comes together around any one idea - or even a few ideas - as much as it needs to in order to have an impact. I still liked it a lot, but ultimately it feels like a lovely slice of life without much "there" there.

I couldn’t quite decide the key message behind this story. On the surface it describes the emergence of a virus that grips an entire town. It’s very cryptic description of sequence of events is too close for comfort given we are currently in the midst of a pandemic with COVID19. The effects of the virus itself allude to more abstract concepts of existentialism. There are those who are comforted living in other concepts of time- for some it’s the past and others it’s the future and still for others it’s the present. And then for others there’s no comfort at all. All who survive the virus, however, are forever changed.