October 1, 2018
Walker, who set her first novel, The Age of Miracles (2012), in a dystopian near future, returns to the present with this science-fiction fairy tale about a mysterious epidemic putting inhabitants of a California community to sleep.The first victim in Santa Lora is a freshman at the local college discovered in her dorm room breathing but unwakeable. Soon more students are falling asleep, as are the medical personnel caring for them. On the 14th day, when there are 22 sleepers, the local hospital goes into quarantine when researchers conclude the culprit is an airborne virus. Too late. A combination of events including Halloween trick-or-treating and the escape of students from their quarantine spreads the virus. By the 18th day, the number of sleepers requiring round the clock care balloons to 500. The entire town is sealed off, but the number of those infected keeps growing. Within the spellbindingly measured narrative of the public health crisis are woven emotionally charged individual stories. A freshman's first sexual experience results in pregnancy the night before she's stricken; the chronicle of the growing life within her counterbalances the evolution of the epidemic. Two other freshmen become volunteers and unlikely lovers. An already paranoid college janitor recognizes the danger of contagion before everyone else; when he nevertheless is infected, his preteen daughters fend for themselves. Their neighbors cope with a fragile marriage while caring for their newborn infant, who may have been exposed to the virus through donated breast milk. A dementia patient seems to regain his consciousness just when others are losing theirs. Political refugees from Egypt see their lives torn apart yet again. The biggest surprise may come when Walker shifts focus to show the dreams and life within individual sleepers' minds.What is the nature of an epidemic? What is the nature of consciousness? What mix of loyalty and love binds individuals together? These are a few of the questions Walker raises in her provocative, hypnotic tale.
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Starred review from October 8, 2018
Walker’s richly imaginative and quietly devastating second novel (after The Age of Miracles) begins in a college dorm in an isolated town in the hills of Southern California, where a freshman thinks she is coming down with the flu. In fact, she has a mysterious disease that causes its victims to fall into a deep, dream-laden sleep from which they cannot be woken, and which sometimes leads to death. The disease spreads slowly at first, then more rapidly, and soon the whole town is under a quarantine. The perspective moves smoothly in and out of the minds of several of the college students and town residents, drawing back to look at the entire situation from a detached but compassionate point of view and then plunging back into the minds of those attempting to deal with the escalating problems. Among the characters are Mei, a lonely college freshman; 12-year-old Sara, who copes with an unhinged survivalist father; Sara’s neighbors, a faculty couple with a newborn baby; and aging biology professor Nathaniel. As the majority of the people of the town fall victim to the disease, neuropsychiatrist Catherine Cohen, separated from her family by the quarantine, tries desperately to find its cause, until arson at a library that’s being used as a makeshift hospital has unintended results on the state of some of the dreamers. The relatively large number of central characters makes it likely that some will succumb to the disease, upping the suspense of the story. Walker jolts the narrative with surprising twists, ensuring it keeps its energy until the end. This is a skillful, complex, and thoroughly satisfying novel about a community in peril.
September 15, 2018
A student at a California college falls asleep and cannot be wakened, and soon a mysterious, often lethal disease is sweeping the campus and the town beyond, as we meet panicked students in quarantine plotting their escape and forging new relationships, a survivalist college janitor terrified of infecting his daughters, two young professors whose marriage is already strained by a new baby, and more. Having wowed us with the New York Times best-selling, multi-best-booked The Age of Miracles, Walker here challenges our perceptions about time, mind, and reality while examining those tough situations when civil liberties butt against community interests and we must choose whom to save.
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