One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry the girl away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital.
My Review:Then a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled. A quarantine is established. Mei, an outsider in the hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrown together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate.
A psychiatrist summoned from Los Angeles attempts to make sense of the phenomenon as it spreads. Those infected, she discovers, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?
Gorgeously written, The Dreamers is a breathtaking novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—in our waking days and, perhaps even more, in our dreams.
I guess I should just stop having high expectations when anyone compares a book to Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel . . . I always end up disappointed. Had I not read that book and had I not read that comparison prior to reading this book, I may have enjoyed it slightly more but instead this felt a bit pedestrian. I wasn't surprised, I wasn't intrigued. The writing is fine, not superb, but it just feels like another attempt in a long line of dystopians that just leaves me wanting more.
This time, it starts at the college.
It starts with a girl leaving a party. She feels sick, she tells her friends, like a fever, she says, like the flue. And tired, too, as tired as she has ever felt in her life.
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