Book Review: The Book Eaters

Truth is found between the stories we're fed and the stories we hunger for.

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. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. 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 fairy tales and cautionary stories. But 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.

The Book Eaters, the debut novel by Sunyi Dean, will be released on August 2, 2022. Tor Books provided me an early galley of this urban sci-fi novel in exchange for an honest review.

The concept of this novel grabbed me right out of the gate. By switching back and forth between Devon's present and past, Dean brings out the concepts that are key to the worldbuilding in this book in an enticing manner. It is like consuming a rich meal by going through a variety of interesting courses. Each chapter kept me wanting to read more.

Not surprisingly, this story makes statements about the patriarchy and women's rights by using the fantasy concepts as stand-ins for real-world equivalents. She also takes the classic concept of "predators living among us" and turned it on its ear. Vampires have been done to death, so thankfully Dean has taken a different approach. As a librarian, the idea of a group who survive by consuming books, literally, was very attractive.

One thing that felt "off" to me was how easily characters spill secrets, secrets they've been holding on to for a long time or those they have been made privy to due to their situations. I would expect that those who have to live so cautiously would be more careful with how they hold their cards. There were also other instances of characters making questionable actions and statements at times just to keep the story progressing. Finally, overall, the book turned out to be a lot more violent than I had expected.