Sons are seen as a disappointment, but even worse is when the baby isn’t even a Book Eater, but a Mind Eater instead (identified by a very long tongue). This leaves the six remaining Book Eater families slightly out of options, and they end up forcing daughters into arranged marriages in the hopes that a girl will be born. Book Eaters are slowly essentially becoming extinct though, largely due to how they live separate and in secret from humans, without any way of getting identification to pass through borders to where other ‘Eaters are. The main character, Devon, is one such ‘Eater and one of the titular Book Eaters in fact.

The Book Eaters is centred around an urban fantasy/horror world, where ‘Eaters exist. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon-like all other book eater women-is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairytales and cautionary stories.īut real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger-not for books, but for human minds.

Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.ĭevon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack romance novels are sweet and delicious. Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. It’s a story of motherhood, sacrifice, and hope of queer identity and learning to accept who you are of gilded lies and the danger of believing the narratives others create for you. Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters is a contemporary fantasy debut. Source: eARC from the publisher provided through NetGalley (this in no way affects my review which is honest and unbiased) physical ARC traded to get and a couple of editions purchased… The Book Eaters is a wonderful story that reads like a mash-up of a horror, fantasy and contemporary all in one, and I’m excited to see what comes next from Sunyi after reading it. People who eat books and can then retain that knowledge? Sounds pretty great on the whole to be honest!īut even in a world like that, there is danger and not everything is as good as it sounds. I had my eye on the book for today’s review, The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, for a while due to how intriguing the synopsis sounded.

The book eaters by sunyi dean