For a book on such an interesting topic, Dreamland was a real struggle for me to get through. The main problem is that it is way too long for the amount of content it covered. The book is mostly divided into short four or five page chapters, with each covering a different town and different people. Each of these towns and people then needed their own only-tangentially relevant background information and histories, so the book really bogged down from that. Also, the tale of the opiate epidemic in each of these towns and people are pretty much the same, so it's just reading the same story over and over.
Even in tracing where the drugs are coming from, it's also the same story over and over, with doctors from different towns over-proscribing pain medication, and men from a small Mexican town selling heroin in the US. It feels like the author took copious notes from many different sources, and then just turned his notes directly into prose format instead of parring them down to a concise, cohesive story. At the end, I feel like I could have gotten the same information just from reading a few articles on this topic.
Readaroo Rating: 2 stars
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