Book Review: The Book Eaters

Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters follows Devon, a book eater woman trapped under the thumb of the powerful and relentlessly archaic book eater families, as well as the enforcers who oversee marriages between Families, the Knights. Her son Cai, a mind eater who feeds on minds rather than books, will starve without the increasingly elusive Redemption, a drug that allows mind eaters to feed on books like other book eaters. The family who produces the drug, the Ravenscars, has vanished, and it’s up to Devon to find a way to extricate herself from the Families by locating the disappeared Family and acquiring enough Redemption for her and her son to live free of the Families and the Knights.

The lore around book eaters is well done—a species that is stronger and faster than humans, unaffected by things like temperature or normal hunger and instead sustained by books, the taste varying widely based on things like genre and binding. They have retractable “book teeth” that they use to chew books and have a taste for things like “ink tea,” maps, and fairytales. Perhaps most interesting of all, they cannot write, as though some psychological impairment makes it impossible.

Their mind eater counterparts, however, feed on brains instead of books, absorbing the knowledge, thoughts, and personalities of their victims. Instead of bookteeth, mind eaters have a proboscis-like tongue that inserts into the ear drum of the victim and absorbs the mind within.

It’s this kind of book eater lore that would have been fascinating to get more of throughout the course of the book. However, most of the story is relegated to the politics of the Families and the Knights, their traditional values and antiquated beliefs, particularly when it comes to women. The story feels oddly out of time, set in modern times but following beings that may as well still exist in the Victorian age, making it difficult for a while to pinpoint when exactly the book takes place.

Nevertheless, with fascinating book eater lore and an interesting protagonist in Devon—a mother who will do whatever she has to do for her mind eater son, and the contemptuous relationship between her and her Knight brother Ramsay, The Book Eaters makes for an excellent dark fantasy read for anyone looking to crack open a book with something new.