The Dreamers By Karan Thomson Walker is an ensemble of characters dealing with an epidemic where people fall in a dreamscape hibernation with no end in sight. The mastery of the novel is in the way the story is told with the reader weaving in and out of character’s lives like a dream. The writing flows sometimes lyrically from one life to another. The stories eventually overlap with one another weaving pieces here and there. The novel does keep you on your toes of who is going to catch the “dreams” next, or not at all. I liked this book but felt the way it was told was great at showing the impact of the disease, but did lack some of my emotional connection to it. Just when I found a character interesting it would jump to the next. The author mentions Thorton Wilder’s play “Our Town” because one of the teen character’s got in the middle school play, which is how the novel is told a slice of life during an epidemic.

The Plot: In the sleepy town of Santa Lora, Kara gets a disease while coming home from a college party. The disease is one that causes the person to dream for an undetermined amount of time. Kara is the first, her symptoms so slight she fell asleep in her bed while her roommate fails to notice just how long she’s been asleep, on day two Kara is dead of dehydration thanks to the alcohol consumed at the party, at first the sleeping death is just a weird thing, then three people all on the same floor all fall asleep and can not be woken up. The floor is then isolated with all walls washed in bleach and cleaners with the kids not being able to leave. One of the Janitor’s who’s job was to clean did so with out mask and the dangers of the situation is a conspiracy theorist, survivalist, and a single father starts locking his kids up and lives in their bunker/basement stocked full of supplies. Their neighbor’s parents of a newborn Ben and Annie have a weird reaction with one of the girls before they watch them bored up there house from the inside. The couple have heard about the disease but more hear say as Ben is a teacher there, but Annie was not producing enough milk and they got it from other women at the hospital that produce more, and one nurse who works with the milks falls victim to the sleep. More on the dorm room fall asleep and a disease specialist Catherine is called in as the first case happens by another student who was not on the floor. The whole town is on lock down as some of the kids on the dorm floor escape, when they realize the security guards are to scared to touch them causing a global crisis. Are some mysteriously immune, is there some cure, will the victims ever wake up?

What I Liked: The character’s feel very real, since we meet with all them so briefly, they are defined really fast some exceed expectations as they’re quickly developed. Of the six main families and friends followed, they’re all really different and give us many examples of how people deal with this trauma. There’s a great moment that really puts you in the character’s perspective and fear that they will fall asleep with out waking and their child will die with out being taken car of. There’s another moment that I really enjoyed, and questioned if I should because it involves someone on dying but the situation is funny because one character talks about how they’ll deal if faced with death, and it happens around that character in a veiled way how they say, but it made me laugh when that scene played out the way it did. The prose is really excellent how it flows. The novel is made to be dream like and you will debate with yourself if it is or is not.

What I Disliked: The closure, is really fast and doesn’t explain all that I wanted to know about what the disease actually is and where and how it started? The lack of emotional connection for me. These character’s are all very well rounded but I really only connected with Sara, Libby, Annie and Ben, I liked other character’s but didn’t really care for them which are 4 character’s out of 20, so 20 percent of the characters.

Recommendations: This was my hardest book to review, I was between a 3 and 4 the whole time. I’m going with barely a 4 star. So I will recommend this one barely, if you like really great prose and get caught up in the poetry of the words, then I think you will enjoy this one. But if you’re looking for an emotional connection with the character’s then I would not recommend this one. I did see one reviewer say I actually liked a science fiction novel, I will say this is science fiction extremely lite, like I love Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life and would put it in the same category. I would put this in the general fiction section. I rated this barely 4 out of 5 stars.