Goodreads Summary: 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.
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.
Goodreads Rating: 3.64 with over 40,000 ratings
Genre Listing: Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, LGBT, Adult, Queer, Books About Books
Goodreads Challenge: 16/60 (I am so not finishing this.)
2024 Reading Challenge: #45 Read a book that has double letters in the title (find the entire Challenge here)
2024 Reading Challenge: #45 Read a book that has double letters in the title (find the entire Challenge here)
Book Review:
Hello Readers! I hope everyone is having a good June so far. I am having a very crazy year. I haven't gotten a chance to read much because last month, I got a 5-month-old puppy. One of my dad's dogs had an oops litter of one puppy back in January, so I took her in once I was done traveling, and she was old enough. It's been chaotic between a kitten and a puppy, working many hours, and I also started my second Master's Degree this week. Yes, I am fully aware that I am insane, and Tress will exclaim that I have no sympathy for school. I'll share pictures of my chaos animals after the review. I'll do a challenge update here soon as I have a couple of other books finished but haven't done a review for them.
I don't remember when I acquired The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, but I'm so glad I did! I loved it from the first couple of sentences. The premise of the story was really unique and relatively dark. The book-eater race was human-like but ate books for nourishment. It was also how they retained information. I liked that Sunyi appealed to the senses by giving the books flavors, which could vary by genre and materials. The culture was pretty dark. The eaters are dying out and, as a result, have to have arranged marriages. The mind eaters have an unfortunate lot in life, having to eat minds.
The plot, aside from the culture, is interesting. It's labeled as horror, but I didn't find it particularly scary. It's gory in places, but that's the extent of it. There's a lot of action, especially towards the end of the book. I liked the play on the Eater Families and how they mainly eat fairy tales, labeling their women as princesses, mind eaters as dragons, and the keepers of the dragons/protectors of the women knights. I also appreciated that Devon, an Eaters' Princess, saved herself and then saved her own princess. That was super cute.
The plot, aside from the culture, is interesting. It's labeled as horror, but I didn't find it particularly scary. It's gory in places, but that's the extent of it. There's a lot of action, especially towards the end of the book. I liked the play on the Eater Families and how they mainly eat fairy tales, labeling their women as princesses, mind eaters as dragons, and the keepers of the dragons/protectors of the women knights. I also appreciated that Devon, an Eaters' Princess, saved herself and then saved her own princess. That was super cute.
One thing that was lacking in the story was the characters' personality. They all felt a little flat to me. The book is definitely plot-driven rather than character-driven. I also thought there needed to be more context on the back story of the eaters. There is some in the book, and many of the chapters have a small blurb, but it felt like an afterthought.
Overall, I really enjoyed it. I had wanted to finish it a while ago, but life happens. If you need help with the Challenge, this will also fit on prompt #3, as it is under 300 pages.
And now, here are some pictures of my Chaos to show why I'm not reading or sleeping. The puppy's name is Galaxy Lynn. Her cat sister is Nebula Jane.
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