An already paranoid college janitor recognizes the danger of contagion before everyone else when he nevertheless is infected, his preteen daughters fend for themselves. Two other freshmen become volunteers and unlikely lovers. 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. Within the spellbindingly measured narrative of the public health crisis are woven emotionally charged individual stories.

The entire town is sealed off, but the number of those infected keeps growing. By the 18th day, the number of sleepers requiring round the clock care balloons to 500. A combination of events including Halloween trick-or-treating and the escape of students from their quarantine spreads the virus. On the 14th day, when there are 22 sleepers, the local hospital goes into quarantine when researchers conclude the culprit is an airborne virus. Soon more students are falling asleep, as are the medical personnel caring for them. The first victim in Santa Lora is a freshman at the local college discovered in her dorm room breathing but unwakeable. 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 dreamers karen walker