Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Every day I went into the office for work or hung out with friends instead of reading this book, I was very torn. I was riveted by this book. The concept of sleepwalkers making their way across the US is a fascinating idea and I can see why Mr. Wendig decided this idea was worth fleshing out into a full book.

This book does an amazing job of combining real risks, such as pandemics and white supremacy with the fantastic, AI that can talk across time using Quantum entanglement, Nanobots that can put people into a stasis mode (while making them walk around) for almost 6 years. While telling a compelling believable story. Even the fantastical parts of the story, could very literally be fact in a number of years. We have no idea how AI might work with Quantum computing in a few years.

The truth is, Wendig pulled back the veil on how close we are as a society to a catastrophic pandemic. How easy it would be for a plague to spread if the right person was infected. He does a fantastic job of show how fragile the entire US system is, because of people like Alex Jones. Because Alex Jones doesn’t believe what he’s spewing, but there are a lot of people that do believe it. That weaponize it. Wendig is clearly taking the Trumpian politics of 2019 and imposing them on a catastrophe.

That’s just the backdrop though. The characters he writes about are living breathing people. Many of them, I feel like I grew up with or that I have known in my life. The aging RockGod feels like an authentic person. Someone that probably exists and is lost and lonely. There are people who have lived and lost and they are only teenagers, barely having started their lives and they’re already so far behind. Then they lose more because a family member becomes a sleepwalker.

The human element in this book is beautifully tragic and so very human. I loved this book.

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