Captivating tale of one’s extraordinary will to survive
THE DREAMERS KAREN THOMPSON WALKER SCRIBNER SOMETIMES weeks after reading the final page of a book, it stays with you. The characters root themselves into your mind, burrowing their way into your heart. It becomes a comfortable living arrangement – fiction living side by side with reality.
This is what The Dreamers became to me. It took me less than a week to immerse myself in the fictional California town of Santa Lora, a town filled with sorrow, loss and longing.
first introduces us to Mei six weeks into her freshman year. A loner and terribly shy, she doesn’t think anything wrong when her roommate returns from a party one night and falls into a deep sleep. Only the next day does she find something is not quite right when she tries to rouse her. She ends up in hospital where she sleeps while babies are born, while an old man dies in a distant room and through sunrise and sunset.
This is how the sleeping sickness begins. One by one, it starts claiming its victims. Yet, few people die – they just fall into a deep sleep, and the only thing they have in common is that they are dreaming – some of the past, some of the future, and some dream of premonitions.
Karen Thompson Walker is the author of Sunday Times best-seller
follows the lives of three main characters and how their fates are intertwined because of a mysterious virus.
Call it fate or a series of unfortunate events, Mei finds herself with fellow student Matthew. They are inextricably drawn together and form an unlikely alliance and romance, which is doomed from the start.
But one couple that draws me, even days after finishing the book, is Ben and Annie. The newlyweds are parents to a 4-month-old baby girl. Fresh from New York, the young academics moved to Santa Lora for a slower-paced life. There’s a lot unsaid between the two, once the quiet exchanges become explosive arguments, and eventually end in silence.
Emotionally draining and, at times, just too much to bear, it took me days to read the book.
At its core, it is a story about our extraordinary will to survive and how, when it comes to it, we would do anything for the people we love. It’s captivating, at times lovely, and downright sad. But we all thrive on drama at times, so I reckon it’s bound to be on some best-seller list or another.