The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean

Devon, the protagonist of Sunyi Dean’s unsettling novel, The Book Eaters, is caught between a rock and a hard place. In her case, the rock is her family and the hard place is her child. Devon’s family is special. They sustain themselves by eating books and not in a metaphorical way. The family keeps to themselves as much as possible. By the time we meet Devon, however, she has managed to break free somehow. Well, sort of. Her rock and her hard place keep her from being truly free. The hope that she might be keeps Devon putting one foot in front of the other as the rock and hard place collide, catching her in the middle.

The Book Eaters jumps back and forth from Devon’s present to her past and it takes several chapters to learn what on earth is going on with Devon and her son, Cai. All we know at first is that Cai is very sick. There’s a drug that can make him well, but the only people who make it have gone off even the secretive book eater grid. Unlike his mother, who draws nourishment from books (the older the better), Cai eats minds. At this point, I realized that, instead of a bookish flavored fantasy, this book is actually a horror novel. This book gets very bloody (or inky, as the case may be) very quickly.

The chapters set in Devon’s past explain why and do absolutely nothing to relieve the creepy atmosphere. Devon, we learn, was the treasured girl-child of a family in decline. The book eaters are struggling to reproduce. As soon as they are of age, girls are entered into arranged marriages in the hope that they will have children before their ovaries shut down. The girls have no choice in the matter. Sometimes, the marriages go well, while they last. Unfortunately for Devon, her first marriage was not good and her second was much worse.

I understood Devon’s motivations. She loves her son and would do anything to keep him alive. On the other hand, I didn’t understand the motivations of her brother, Ramsey, who sets himself up as her antagonist. Where Devon just wants an escape for herself and her son, Ramsey wants to restore the old way of things, with himself bossing everyone around. He’s given a background full of the kind of abuse meant to make him loyal to the “knights” who are tasked with controlling people like Cai and with arranging the marriages that produce the next generations of book eaters. It works too well for me to find it plausible. I found Ramsey’s monologing and stubbornness weirdly one-dimensional, especially in comparison to Devon and Cai’s characterization.

I try not to fault books for not being what I hoped they would be after reading the early publisher blurbs. I wish there had been more about the history of the book eaters. Some of the characters hint at their origins, but we only ever get hints. Instead, the book takes its premise and the wonderful character of Devon and insists on steering the plot into horror and thriller territory. The Book Eaters is an interesting book, sure, but I wouldn’t recommend it to fans of fantasy or dark academia. This book is for readers who like original scenarios along with flying bullets.