I Hope You're Hungry... For The Book Eaters
With its unique concept and complex characters, The Book Eaters is worth reading just for its lore alone.
These days, Devon only bought three things from the shops: books, booze, and Sensitive Care skin cream.
This might just be a folk tradition from my culture, but when I was younger, I was taught that if you wanted to pass your exams, you had to burn your school notes and mix the ashes together with water to drink. And if you drank this makeshift potion, you would absorb all the knowledge you needed for your tests.
Mind you, you still had to study, it wasn’t like you could just skip over that step, but this “hack” was supposed to guarantee you could easily remember all the information you had been cramming for ages. For what it’s worth, I never did this but mostly because I preferred to keep the notes intact for last-minute revision.
In Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters, creatures known as book eaters actually do have the ability to absorb knowledge from eating books. Devon is one of the rare female book eaters born to the Six Families, whom have been struggling with infertility. Due to their declining population and lack of female book eaters, all women are to be wedded off at least twice to different families and bear them a child to ensure the continuation of their species.
But during her second marriage, when Devon gives birth to a mind eater, an offshoot of a book eater with a hunger for minds rather than pages, she has to find a way to save her child from being taken away. Her only option may be to leave altogether but running away is harder than it seems, especially with a ravenous child in tow.
It was a struggle to get a copy of The Book Eaters, which was determined not to be in bookstores even weeks after publications. I went down one day after the bookstore had listed it online as being in stock, only to find it was still not on the shelves. The staff ended up having to call me to come back down a few days later.
The Book Eaters was recommended to me on Twitter a year before its official release, through some other authors I follow. I’ve always want to read more gothic horror novels, and I was particularly taken by the synopsis and how the book was about how far a mother was willing to go for her child — perfect for the chilly month of October.
In some ways, The Book Eaters isn’t really about a mother’s love. Devon herself admits that at some point, her child Cai has stopped calling her mother, and she sees their relationship more as one that is mutually abusive and codependent. I won’t lie reading that line broke my heart. With no motherly instinct of my own, I don’t think I would have loved my child enough to be willing to hunt humans to feed them with, especially knowing that I was being chased down by other book eaters.
Devon and Cai’s relationship is beautifully complex and nuanced, and the two of them really carry the story. Throughout the book, there is a lot left unsaid between the mother and child—understandable when you get to understand Devon and Cai’s individual trauma—and while they are on the run, they never get a chance to just be with the other. The Book Eaters could have really benefitted from being longer; a sequel is definitely being set up here, which is probably why there was still so much that was left unresolved at the end. Even so, I definitely would have loved to see just a bit more of the world that The Book Eaters is set in and seen more moments between mother and child.
Sunyi Dean’s debut novel is also written as two parallel timelines, and we skip back and forth between the present and the past to piece together what pushed Devon to flee with her monstrous child. I feel like the book would have been stronger had they simply kept the timelines completely separate, with maybe the first half of the book being about Devon’s childhood and marriages, and the second being about her fight for survival.
I also thought the book would be more scary, but apart from a few brief scenes with gory descriptions, there’s nothing here that would force you to hide under the blankets. The Book Eaters is more creepy than anything, and any horror elements here are more for giving the book its very anxiety-filled atmosphere.
But with its unique concept, I’m really interested to see how the sequel of The Book Eaters turns out. Devon and Cai really have a lot more room to grow, both individually and as a family, and whatever happens in the sequel, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for something that will keep me up at night.
Rating: 4/5
The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean was released on August 2 and published by Tor Books.