BOOK REVIEW: THE DREAMERS BY KAREN THOMPSON WALKER

I N C L U D E S  A F F I L I A T E  L I N K S

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Title: The Dreamers
Author: Karen Thompson Walker
Published: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 336
Rating: 3/5

Summary:
In a college town in the hills of Southern California, a mysterious sleeping sickness spreads.

Review:
This was a very interesting book and I liked it quite a lot!

I'm always fascinated by books that deal with some sort of mysterious illness, and reading about it is especially interesting given our current times. The book takes a look at how society reacts and shifts when faced with an unexpected and new disease and there are many things in this book that resonate with things that are happening right now.

There is something compelling to me about the way this is written and I read this surprisingly quickly. I really wanted to know what was on the next page and where the story was going to go. There's definitely an eeriness and strange feel to this whole book that I really like. We also get some chapters in here where we see how the outside world reacts to the situation and I found those particularly interesting.

That being said, the story is told in third person and although we meet a lot of characters in here, I had a hard time connecting to them or really feeling like I got to know them. My personal preference is to get really close to characters in books and I would've liked to do that in this, but because the way it's written, I felt a little held at a distance; the story feels like we're getting a birds eye view of what's happening, but it doesn't really let us that close. I felt like we sometimes couldn't get close enough for the moving parts to really be all that moving.

This is pretty close to a four star read for me, but given the distance I felt from the characters and the fact that I felt the ending was a bit too ambiguous, I've tipped the scale down to three stars. It's also not a book I would really recommend to everyone; I feel like it's the type of book that splits opinions and is not for all readers.

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