The Dreamers – Karen Thompson Walker

Rating: 4 stars

I’m trying to think to of why this book didn’t get five stars, and it’s hard to explain. This book was good, an original idea, a less classical approach to storytelling (which is something I go goo-goo for), so I’ll break it down.

The story is that people start falling asleep and not waking up. The book is written in a folkloric style that feels pretty reminiscent of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which is one of the best books that I’ve ever read. The main divergence from this is that there’s very little magical realism in the story, which I think is a problem. This style was particularly useful to A Hundred Years of Solitude because fables and the stories you hear in local communities and personal households are the feel it’s going for. That’s not this book, and it’s mostly realistic(ish) so it feels kinda inappropriate.

There’s no central protagonist, just a collection of people whose lives all intertwine with the events that are happening. There are some people whose lives are more emphasized than others, but not even the most relevant characters each get more than a quarter of the book’s length. For me, this is a good thing. It’s playing into the affliction/the city are the protagonists, and these are just the facets of its actions.

There’s little explanation. No, let me clear that up. There should be little explanation, and that’s how most of the book was. Towards the last act of the book (and really starting before), a lot of the mystery is taken out. Everything gets almost run into the ground. Which is kinda funny when I was reading another review that said the book didn’t explain things nearly enough. Did they want the Hot Zone or did they want A Hundred Years of Solitude? I think the author started off with the latter, but, due to how many thanks are in the acknowledgment (yes, this is a thing I do), I really think the uniqueness and interesting parts of leaving the story open to interpretation got taken away. The book got too workshopped and made safe, even if it’s not a safe book because of its nontraditional storytelling.

One example I’m going to use. I started off the book with an intense conviction that sleep would be a metaphor for something. By the end, I wasn’t so sure of it. Was it supposed to be life? An explicable event? That science may give some answers, but creativity and the human brain are more complicated than we know? It’s a message, and I applaud it for being unique, but I don’t think it reached the potential it could and should have. It’s still a good book I enjoyed.