by Karen Thompson Walker
by Karen Thompson Walker I've been caught out once again by a book written in present tense. Why, oh why is this a thing? The story is about a strange virus that makes people fall asleep and not wake up, but remain dreaming. It was an interesting premise, but because present tense is so difficul...
The story of a "sleeping sickness" virus that sweeps through a small, isolated college town. It was recommended in an NPR article on epidemic/plague fiction as reflective of our current situation: In parallel with today's pandemic, the characters in Walker's novel confront a shortage of face mas...
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker is a dystopian sci-fi novel that takes place in a small town in California. (Is it still dystopian/apocalyptic if it's contained in one area?) The book begins with a young girl in college who is a bit of a misfit on her dorm floor. She doesn't even have much of ...
Dreams fascinate me, and sometimes they scare me. I've had dreams that feel so real that when I wake up, it takes a split second for me to realize that the real world is this one instead of the one in my dream. Or is it? Some dreams are so bizarre and frightening that I wake up feeling thankful that...
A special thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group—Random House for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.A college freshman stumbles back to her dorm room and falls asleep. She sleeps all morning and into the next evening. Her roommate, Mei, tries to wake her without success; para...
I will probably forever associate author Karen Thompson Walker with the number “one million.” It's a fairly big number and it's also quite a lot for the author to live up to. If you didn't know, Walker's debut novel, The Age of Miracles, was the subject of a bidding war that garnered an advance of o...
Kara told her roommate she was unusually tired when she crawled into her bunk bed. Still in her clothes and her boots from the night before, her roommate left Kara sleeping the next morning knowing that perhaps she needed more sleep, little did she know that Kara would never wake up. The kids watc...