The Book Eaters

“For Chrissakes, I'm a grown-up. Swearing is my privilege!”

I don't generally read urban fantasy (too “real” in a way I can't really describe, and it tends to bore me), and I definitely don't read vampire/gothic horror stuff (too romance-riddled). But I guess when you throw those genres in a blender with a unique magic system and some found-family LGBT elements, it made the whole thing a whole lot more interesting.

Devon is a book eater, a small, secretive clan of people who, rather than reading books and eating food, eat their books. Like, literally, page by page, cover to cover, omnomnom down the hatch, eat books for sustenance and knowledge. They're a very small clan and predisposed to giving birth to more males than females, so the rare females of the clan live a pampered life of a princess–doomed to arranged marriages and being treated more like property than as people. Not content with this life, Devon escapes with her second child Cai, who himself is a mind eater. Mind eaters are genetically different book eaters, and instead of eating books, eat minds instead. Like, brain matter. Memories. Personalities. That sort of thing. The clans of book eaters generally deal with these aberrations harshly, either training them as weapons or killing them outright. Devon is determined to escape the life she was born to, but still needs to procure ‘Redemption', the medicine manufactured by one of the book eater clans that keeps mind eater hunger at bay.

I'm a sucker for a unique magic system. The author fully fleshed out the lore of these book eaters, with the different genres having different tastes, incorporating the knowledge aspect into the story, and having numerous epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter adding to the book eater/mind eater lore. It was really well done. I liked Devon as a main character, and loved the found family/attraction aspect between her and Hester. The book eater clans also had different stories behind each one, though I wish there had been a bit more of that lore fleshed out as well. I thought the story was compelling and interesting, and I appreciated how the current day story was weaved into Devon's story from ten years ago. The side-by-side telling was well done.

I really only wish there had been some inclusion or closure on the Salem aspect. The author has said here that this was intended as a stand-alone and is not supposed to have a sequel which is a little disappointing, but entirely understandable.

I had a lot of fun with this book, and I'm glad I gave it a chance.

If you remember that era in the early 2000s where everyone was making zombie media but it wasn't really cool anymore, so they were all sort of ashamed about it and like, “well MY creatures aren't zombies because they [one random gimmick; it's a fungus or whatever],” even though they totally are zombies - this is that but with vampires.

Even at the end I was totally unclear on how book eating was supposed to work. The characters' homes are full of intact books and they have fangs so I assumed they drained the book's “essence” or something, but later a character is putting ketchup on one, or soaking it in water to make it easier to eat. Book eating is always sort of elided, which is kind of funny because mind eating (a sort of mutation that some book eaters have that requires them to eat brains) is so vividly described on multiple occasions.

The characters all sound the same and half the book is characters describing events that have already happened to each other, so there isn't much suspense until right at the end. There is one problem that hangs over the characters for most of the runtime but then is IMMEDIATELY solved the second it actually comes up, which felt kind of pointless.

The romance is terrible; the characters barely talk and suddenly the kid is calling them girlfriends. This woman is the only one the main character really interacts with, which is sort of weird for a book billing itself as feminist. She looks at most other women with either pity or scorn. There is an extremely weird chapter where characters quote the dictionary definition of asexuality at each other that ends up being almost insulting, and the “I ruined a baby with my son's Autism Beam” bit was ridiculous.

I have no idea what the book was trying to say: parental love can be self destructive? Fairy tales destroy the imagination? The author really likes Tomb Raider and needs to make sure we know it?

Edit: with time away from this book, my problems with it bother me more, and I don't think my rating reflects my experience with it.



After finishing this, I think I respect it more than I liked it. It's a book I could see recommending to people, but it didn't really do the things I was hoping or expecting, and didn't make the thing it actually was compelling enough for me to overcome that. Also there were just little things that bothered me. Like, the book eaters only eat books. I couldn't get past this. I know it's the premise. But otherwise they are entirely human! I think it's because the book was so clinical about facts otherwise. There's a scene where a woman sticks it to an angry husband for having a daughter that “the sperm dictates the sex of the baby” and I'm like okay so biologically you are human then BUT HOW ARE YOU GETTING NUTRIENTS. It just kept taking me out of it. And there's a video game sub plot and I don't know for sure but I think Sunyi Dean doesn't play video games, or doesn't often, it just felt inauthentic. A line like “I guess I'll never know how Final Fantasy ends” which I can never imagine a gamer thinking. BUT the prose was great, the concept was great, the book felt very fresh and I felt the themes were expertly done, especially for a debut. There was a lot of really poignant or thought provoking stuff about love, family, motherhood, knowledge, culture, feminism...I'm not sad I read the book, but it also never really made me want to keep reading it, either.

Since finishing, I have thought about it a fair amount, but a lot of my thoughts revolve around missed opportunities. I don't feel like the book gave us enough of (or, perhaps, just not what I wanted to see) of the “Book Eater” culture. In general, you could basically take the book eater element out of the story and have the story not really change, which I didn't really like.

6/10 (previously was 7/10)

CAWPILE SCORE
C-8
A-5
W-7
P-7
I-6
L-8
E-7
TOTAL-6.86/10

CAWPILECharactersDevonCaiVictimsRamseyJarrowKillockHesterAtmosphereWritingSo many good gut punches and emotional moments. With beautiful writing bringing it homePlotGood story Logical conclusionInvestmentInvested more in the emotional relationship between cai and DevonLogicEnjoymentVery much enjoyed this book. The horror is there, but not overpoweringMiscOnly one spot where I felt Cai was “bad” near the end it felt like his personality shifted for extra drama.
I will be talking about it on Libromancy https://libromancy.podbean.com/ on 10/01/2023

Was darker then I initially expected but it soon drew me in. I enjoyed the book and I thought Katie Erich did a great job narrating- it was nice having a different accent to listen too.

CW: body horror, gore, explicit violence, domestic abuse, violence against children

I've been very intrigued by this book since I first read the premise but I was disappointed when I didn't get the arc. What nice luck do I have though that I got an audio advance copy just a few days before the release and I devoured this book (pun totally intended) in just a couple of days. But I'm still pondering on my feelings about it.

I can't deny that the writing is bewitching, the world created by the author is both atmospheric and horrifying, that we are excited to know more but also hate the parts we do get to know. Each chapter is preceded by an epigraph which are quotes from various fairytales and other books and a character's journals and they do an amazing job of setting up the tone of the upcoming chapter, almost building up to the tension. The story told in alternate timelines also works well in keeping our attention because we wanna know how our main characters ended up in their current situation. While the story is set in our world, our characters feel like they belong to an alternate world because they are so isolated and have their own sets of rules and traditions, and revealing all of it little by little was neatly done by the author. And ofcourse the whole idea of this feeling like a fairytale at times and then the author subverting those familiar tropes was quite fascinating to read.

Undoubtedly though, what's stays after finishing the book or even while reading is the kinds of questions that arise in our head. The book eater world is very misogynistic and women are rare in their community and treated like “princesses”, but we quickly see that being a princess here also means having absolutely no agency over their lives or bodies, being confined to forced arranged marriages and being vessels for breeding children, and then also being separated from said children at the age of three. It was very hard not to think of the current scenario of abortion rights in the US and how laws are being made every day in states to force women to give birth with no consideration to what they want.

The book eaters/mind eaters are also very much inspired by vampire lore as the author has mentioned many times in interviews and that was another interesting aspect of the story - getting to know vampiric characters in a new light. Most of the characters we encounter here are some form of monsters and once we see their actions and how they came to be that way, we start to wonder if there are good and bad monsters, and if we can really root for some of them.

This is ultimately the story of Devon, her son Cai and how motherhood transforms her life. We see the progression of her arc from being a carefree child who thinks she is a princess to one who realizes she has no freedom to make her choices, including the desire to want to be with her child. Once her son Cai turns out to be a mind eater, she is compelled to run with him for the sake of protecting him from everyone.

She makes choices and decisions one after the other which left me questioning (and her as well) if what she was doing was right and I don't think we ever get any answers. She loves her son; while his nature might be monstrous, he is an innocent; so she will do whatever it takes to help him live his life. The author really digs deep into the idea that a mother's love is love - it can't be defined as good or bad, it just is. I had some trouble getting used to this idea of a mother's love because while motherhood is always exalted across cultures and it's always said that a mother will do anything for her child, I'm not a mother and I've never felt such maternal instincts ever in my life. While Devon did struggle with what she had to do to feed Cai, she always chose what was necessary for his survival, and I sometimes found it hard to follow along with a character who could kill people and do many other destructive things along the way for her son.

There are other characters in the narrative, some who help Devon and others who hinder her but everyone has some sort of effect on her mindset and her decisions. I don't wanna talk too much about them but I also think it would have been more interesting to have some of these side characters fleshed out a bit. They have just the necessary amount of interactions with Devon and it sometimes felt like they were all plot devices rather than characters themselves. But it's also ultimately Devon's story, so I guess it works fine for the overall narrative.

In the end, I can say this was a dark and engaging horror-fairytale story with a particular emphasis on the role of female agency and motherhood in a highly patriarchal world, and what does it actually mean to be good or bad in a world full of monsters. Whether the book leaves you fascinated or uncomfortable, it'll hold your attention throughout and keep your mind whirling with more thoughts and questions as the pages go by. I also have to mention the audiobook narrator Katie Erich because she brings a unique voice and richness to this story and while it took me little time to get comfortable with her Northern England accent, it felt perfect for the story and I'm glad I got to listen to it.